Many cryptographic techniques have been proposed to conceive a secure and privacy-oriented vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) for its practical deployment. The security of these techniques requires a common secret key to be shared between the communicating entities or depend upon the premise that some mathematical problems are computationally hard. However, because of the open nature of the wireless medium, the communication cannot be kept confidential and is prone to eavesdropping. Furthermore, with the arrival of quantum computers, these techniques are prone to quantum attacks—the time complexity of the assumed hard problem gets reduced from millions of years to a few seconds. In this paper, we propose a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on a quantum key distribution protocol for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. Our scheme inherits the properties of the quantum key distribution protocol. It does not require a secret authentication key to be transmitted conventionally and is resistant to quantum attacks. Apart from protecting VANETs against generic security threats, including node impersonation, message tampering, and repudiation, our scheme defends VANETs against man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, etc. Besides, our protocol ensures message unlinkability, vehicle-identity privacy, and vehicle traceability if a vehicle misbehaves. The results obtained from the performance evaluation of our scheme confirm reasonable values of information leakage, key length, bit error probability, etc.
Many cryptographic techniques have been proposed to conceive a secure and privacy-oriented vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) for its practical deployment. The security of these techniques requires a common secret key to be shared between the communicating entities or depend upon the premise that some mathematical problems are computationally hard. However, because of the open nature of the wireless medium, the communication cannot be kept confidential and is prone to eavesdropping. Furthermore, with the arrival of quantum computers, these techniques are prone to quantum attacks—the time complexity of the assumed hard problem gets reduced from millions of years to a few seconds. In this paper, we propose a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on a quantum key distribution protocol for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. Our scheme inherits the properties of the quantum key distribution protocol. It does not require a secret authentication key to be transmitted conventionally and is resistant to quantum attacks. Apart from protecting VANETs against generic security threats, including node impersonation, message tampering, and repudiation, our scheme defends VANETs against man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, etc. Besides, our protocol ensures message unlinkability, vehicle-identity privacy, and vehicle traceability if a vehicle misbehaves. The results obtained from the performance evaluation of our scheme confirm reasonable values of information leakage, key length, bit error probability, etc.
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) connect numerous vehicles, allowing efficient vehicle-to-vehicle communication through a dedicated network. The dynamic connectivity of VANETs facilitates spontaneous communication among diverse vehicles, enabling real-time exchange of crucial information like traffic conditions, road hazards, and other pertinent data. This collaborative network enhances road safety and traffic efficiency by enabling vehicles to share information and adapt to changing conditions in their proximity, ultimately improving the overall transportation system. This paper proposes an authentication protocol designed to be unconditionally secure against quantum attacks. The research delves into integrating quantum authentication with blockchain technology to establish a secure framework for VANETs. We introduce a quantum blockchain framework focused on bolstering the security of VANETs. The paper provides a thorough analysis of the potential of quantum blockchain in addressing common security threats in VANETs, including data tampering, eavesdropping, and unauthorized access.
The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has emerged as a promising solution to overcome the limited coverage of conventional roadside unit (RSU)-based infrastructures. However, UAVs operate in open environments and cannot be fully trusted, while the rapid advancement of quantum computing threatens the long-term security of classical public-key cryptographic systems. As a result, many existing UAV-based VANET authentication schemes face fundamental limitations in future deployments. Most existing schemes either lack post-quantum security or incur excessive computational and communication overhead, making them unsuitable for real-time and high-mobility vehicular environments. In addition, the common assumptions of trusted UAVs do not align with realistic threat models. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight post-quantum authentication and key exchange protocol based on the module learning with errors (MLWE) problem and physically unclonable functions (PUFs). The proposed scheme treats UAVs as untrusted relay nodes and excludes them from session key generation. Its security is evaluated using informal analysis, the real-or-random (RoR) model, BAN logic, and AVISPA, while performance evaluation indicates improved efficiency compared to existing schemes.
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.
Communication in VANETs (Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network) is crucial when the vehicle is moving.Since these communications take place wirelessly without a direct physical connection, they are vulnerable to attacks such as spoofing, eavesdropping and message tampering.To protect these communications, various classical cryptographic algorithms are in use so that security breach is minimised.However, the algorithms focus on the complexity of the mathematical solution of problems, and such problems can be vulnerable to advanced quantum computing attacks, which makes them less suitable for required long-term quantum-resilient security.To address the challenges related with VANETs, this paper has introduced a new approach which is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD).In the proposed approach, QKD is used to securely establish the encryption key, while the actual messages are transmitted through the conventional classical communication system.In addition, Zero Trust verification is incorporated as an additional security layer, ensuring that communication entities are continuously verified before trusted communication is established.The paper implements and compares two security architectures in the CARLA 0.10.0 simulator: a classical RSA+ECC-based approach and a proposed QKD with Zero-Trust architecture using AES-256.Their communication latency and cryptographic processing time are evaluated to assess the suitability of QKD-based security for low-latency V2X communication.
Secure message transmission in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is a challenging task due to its highly dynamic nature. In VANETs, road side unit (RSU) transmits different types of ser-vice messages to those vehicles, who have subscribed for that type of message. Intermediate vehicles, those are not subscribed to that service may also receive the message due to broadcast nature of wireless medium. Current literature on VANETs use conventional cryptography for secure message transmission. In this study, the secure service message delivery in VANETs is modeled as a co-operative quantum key distribution among nodes. In the proposed model, vehicles are interested in using services, that are provided by service providers (SPs) through RSUs after a vehicle registered for that service. A quantum key is distributed to registered vehi-cle through RSU, which is needed to unlock the service. RSU can transmit the quantum key to the vehicles, which are within its trans-mission range. A cooperative vehicle helps RSU to transmit the quantum key to a vehicle that is not in its transmission range. A network formation game is modeled for the proposed problem be-tween RSUs and vehicles to form network tree. Vehicles (nodes) use services, work as relay node in-order to cooperate with RSU to relay quantum key. In this paper, a distributed algorithm for cooper-ative quantum key distribution in VANETs (CQKDVN) is modeled, which helps RSU’s to choose a suitable relay node for quantum key distribution. The proposed algorithm, CQKDVN, helps nodes to decide whether to cooperate with a RSU or not based on the incentive it receives by serving a RSU to deliver quantum key to a destination node. CQKDVN also helps the RSU to adapt to the network topology changes such as a node move out of its range or movement of relay nodes that triggers to switch to a new relay node. CQKDVN constitute the network topology into a Nash network.
Blockchain-based Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is widely considered as secure communication architecture for a connected transportation system. With the advent of quantum computing, there are concerns regarding the vulnerability of this architecture against cyber-attacks. In this study, a potential threat is investigated in a blockchain-based VANET, and a corresponding quantum cyber-attack is developed. Specifically, a quantum impersonation attack using Quantum-Shor algorithm is developed to break the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) encrypted digital signatures of VANET and thus create a threat for the trust-based blockchain scheme of VANET. A blockchain-based VANET, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, and vehicular mobility are simulated using OMNET++, the extended INET library, and vehicles-in-network simulation (VEINS) along with simulation of urban mobility (SUMO), respectively. A small key RSA based message encryption is implemented using IBM Qiskit, which is an open-source quantum software development kit. The findings reveal that the quantum cyber-attack, example, impersonation attack is able to successfully break the trust chain of a blockchain-based VANET. This highlights the need for a quantum secured blockchain.