Ensuring communication security in real-time automotive networks is of paramount importance given the sensitivity of the exchanged information and highly safety critical nature of its operation. The first step towards ensuring security is to securely authenticate all the computational nodes through use of authentication protocols based on public-key cryptography. But, traditional public-key cryptographic primitives we use today are believed to be breakable by large scale quantum computers of the future. Thus, NIST is currently running a global global level standardization process for quantum-resistant public-key cryptography, better known as post-quantum cryptography. In this work, we perform a first of its kind practical implementation of a secure authentication protocol for automotive systems with post-quantum cryptographic algorithms and perform a detailed comparative evaluation of the speed and communication bandwidth performance against their pre-quantum counterparts.
Ensuring communication security in real-time automotive networks is of paramount importance given the sensitivity of the exchanged information and highly safety critical nature of its operation. The first step towards ensuring security is to securely authenticate all the computational nodes through use of authentication protocols based on public-key cryptography. But, traditional public-key cryptographic primitives we use today are believed to be breakable by large scale quantum computers of the future. Thus, NIST is currently running a global global level standardization process for quantum-resistant public-key cryptography, better known as post-quantum cryptography. In this work, we perform a first of its kind practical implementation of a secure authentication protocol for automotive systems with post-quantum cryptographic algorithms and perform a detailed comparative evaluation of the speed and communication bandwidth performance against their pre-quantum counterparts.
The rise of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has led to an increased reliance on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication networks to ensure real-time information sharing, situational awareness, and cooperative decision-making. However, the integration of quantum computing into cybersecurity threatens the cryptographic foundations upon which current V2V communication protocols rely. As quantum computers grow closer to practical implementation, traditional public-key encryption schemes—such as RSA and ECC—are rendered vulnerable to attacks from quantum algorithms like Shor’s and Grover’s. This review explores the necessity of adopting quantum-resistant cryptographic protocols to secure V2V communication frameworks. The study critically examines post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, including lattice-based, hash-based, code-based, multivariate polynomial, and isogeny-based schemes, with a focus on their applicability to latency-sensitive and resource-constrained vehicular environments. Furthermore, the paper evaluates the performance, scalability, and implementation challenges of integrating these cryptographic primitives into real-time autonomous systems. Case studies of pilot implementations and emerging research are reviewed to highlight the practicality of these protocols in vehicular edge computing and 5G-enabled automotive networks. The paper concludes by proposing a forward-looking roadmap for standardization and integration of quantum-resilient cryptography in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), ensuring long-term data integrity, authentication, and privacy across V2V infrastructures.
Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is a critical enabler of autonomous driving, supporting real-time information exchange among vehicles, roadside infrastructure, pedestrians, and cloud services. However, the security of current V2X systems largely relies on classical cryptographic mechanisms, which are expected to become vulnerable in the presence of large-scale quantum computers. Given the long operational lifespan and stringent safety requirements of autonomous vehicular networks, the transition toward quantum-resistant authentication and key management mechanisms has become increasingly important. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of post-quantum Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocols for secure V2X communications. The survey systematically reviews V2X communication architectures, security and privacy requirements, existing authentication frameworks, and emerging post-quantum cryptographic approaches. Representative AKA schemes and NIST-standardized post-quantum algorithms are comparatively analyzed in terms of security strength, computational complexity, communication overhead, storage requirements, scalability, and deployment suitability for resource-constrained vehicular environments. The survey further examines practical implementation challenges, including latency constraints, bandwidth limitations, signature size expansion, memory consumption, and hardware resource requirements. The analysis reveals that achieving quantum-resistant security in V2X networks requires balancing strong cryptographic protection with the stringent performance demands of safety-critical vehicular applications. While recent post-quantum approaches offer promising security guarantees against quantum adversaries, their practical deployment remains constrained by computational and communication overhead. Finally, this survey identifies key research gaps and outlines future directions for the development of lightweight, scalable, and quantum-resilient AKA frameworks capable of supporting next-generation autonomous transportation systems. The findings provide researchers and practitioners with a structured understanding of the opportunities, limitations, and challenges associated with securing future V2X communications in the quantum era.
Basic security requirements such as confidentiality, user authentication and data integrity, are assured by using public-key cryptography (PKC). In particular, public-key signature schemes provide non-repudiation, integrity of transmitted messages and authentication. The presence of a large scale quantum computer would be a real threat to break the most widely used public-key cryptographic algorithms in practice, RSA, DSA, ECDSA signature schemes and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Thus, all security protocols and applications where these public-key cryptographic algorithms are used are vulnerable to quantum-computer attacks. There are five directions of cryptographic primitives secure against a quantum computer: multivariate quadratic equation-based, hash-based, lattice-based, code-based and supersingular isogeny-based cryptography. These primitives could serve as replacements for current public-key cryptographic algorithms to prepare for post-quantum era. It is important to prioritize the fields to be replaced by post-quantum cryptography (PQC) since it is hard to replace the currently deployed PKC with PQC at the same time. The fields directly connected to human life such as vehicular communications should be the primary targets of PQC applications. This survey is dedicated to providing guidelines for adapting the most suitable post-quantum candidates to the requirements of various devices and suggesting efficient and physically secure implementations that can be built into existing embedded applications as easily as traditional PKC. It focuses on the five types of post-quantum signature schemes and investigates their theoretical backgrounds, structures, state-of-the-art constructions and implementation aspects on various platforms raging from resource constrained IoT devices to powerful servers connected to the devices for secure communications in post-quantum era. It offers appropriate solutions to find tradeoffs between key sizes, signature lengths, performance, and security for practical applications.
The development of quantum computing poses a very real threat to traditional cryptography, especially these, which are number-theoretic like RSA and ECC.With the more and more development of quantum algorithms such as Shor and Grover, there is an immediate necessity to come up with cryptographic protocols that are resistant to quantum attacks.This paper reviews and discusses different quantum-resistant (post-quantum) cryptographic schemes, such as latticebased, code-based, multivariate, hash-based, and isogeny-based cryptography.It compares these protocols on the assumptions of their security and their efficiency in their computation and the size of their keys as well as their possible integrations into the existing communication infrastructure.Moreover, we also evaluate the standardization process by NIST and the difficulties of moving towards post-quantum security in practical use.This paper proposes a scalable comparison system, which correlates the hypothetical security basis of post-quantum cryptography with the ability to effectively operate in the real world.It has emphasized protocol interoperability, migration compatibility and trade-offs in performance that gives a viable roadmap towards quantum-resistant cryptographic protocols implementation into current communication infrastructures whilst also providing scalable and future secure communication systems.This study, by emphasizing the potential and the drawbacks of the existing post-quantum cryptography schemes, helps in a more precise idea of the directions to follow on the way to a secure, future-proof communications scheme.
The development of quantum computing poses a very real threat to traditional cryptography, especially these, which are number-theoretic like RSA and ECC. With the more and more development of quantum algorithms such as Shor and Grover, there is an immediate necessity to come up with cryptographic protocols that are resistant to quantum attacks. This paper reviews and discusses different quantum-resistant (post-quantum) cryptographic schemes, such as lattice-based, code-based, multivariate, hash-based, and isogeny-based cryptography. It compares these protocols on the assumptions of their security and their efficiency in their computation and the size of their keys as well as their possible integrations into the existing communication infrastructure. Moreover, we also evaluate the standardization process by NIST and the difficulties of moving towards post-quantum security in practical use. This paper proposes a scalable comparison system, which correlates the hypothetical security basis of postquantum cryptography with the ability to effectively operate in the real world. It has emphasized protocol interoperability, migration compatibility and trade-offs in performance that gives a viable roadmap towards quantum-resistant cryptographic protocols implementation into current communication infrastructures whilst also providing scalable and future secure communication systems. This study, by emphasizing the potential and the drawbacks of the existing post-quantum cryptography schemes, helps in a more precise idea of the directions to follow on the way to a secure, future-proof communications scheme.
The advent of quantum computing threatens to undermine current encryption methods significantly, especially those employed in mobile data transmission networks. Quantum algorithms can solve the computational challenges behind present public-key encryption methods like RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) and elliptic curve cryptography at a speedy rate. With mobile communication networks handling more and more sensitive information, the availability of secure authentication methods is increasingly important. This project proposes to investigate how mobile data communication systems can leverage post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) techniques to enhance authentication protocols. The research compares some NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptography candidates, i.e., lattice-based, code-based, hash-based, and multivariate polynomial cryptography, focusing on their usage in mobile environments. We establish a guideline for constructing PQC-improved authentication protocols, focusing on their quantum-resistance, computational cost, and appropriateness for resource-constrained mobile devices. Our analysis proves that the regulations successfully protect information’s secrecy, integrity, and authenticity in the post-quantum era. This has led to the development of future-proof, safe, and resilient mobile communication networks. PQC augmented authentication systems offer good resistance against quantum attacks while supporting acceptable performance on mobile devices, as evidenced by previous research. Mobile communication systems can achieve long-term security through PQC, thus safeguarding user data and critical infrastructure against potential adversaries that might employ quantum computing in the future.