Research on Lightweight Authentication and Quantum Key Encryption Communication for Vehicle-Cloud

Cheng Jiang, Xiaopeng Liu, Xiaoyan Su +2 more

Koushik Challagundla, Kartick Sutradhar

Teng Cheng, Zexu Wu, Chuansu Wang +3 more

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology has recently emerged as a popular area of research, and vehicle-to-cloud communication forms the basis of the IoV. This process involves uploading a large amount of information related to the vehicle and its location. The security of vehicle-to-cloud communication thus has a significant impact on the safety of the IoV. This paper proposes a vehicle-to-cloud communication system based on lightweight authentication and extended Quantum Key Distribution. The system supports the wireless distribution of session keys between vehicles and the Quantum Cloud Server (QCS) by using a WAN (Wide Area Network), and supports the wired transmission of quantum keys between the QCS and the Telematics Service Provider (TSP) through a LAN (Local Area Network) by using the BB84 protocol. The system can implement encrypted communication based on quantum physical security in a hybrid network. Moreover, we propose a lightweight identity authentication scheme. An analysis of its performance shows that the proposed system requires a small amount of computation and incurs a low communication overhead. This scheme is applicable to most Internet devices with low computing and communication capacity, and can potentially be used in the IoV framework. We conducted simulations of the proposed system and experiments to test its performance. The maximum average delay in communication in experiments was 40.681 ms and the maximum rate of packet loss was 0.1222%. The proposed system can thus ensure safe and efficient IoV communication.

Mahmoud AlJamal, Bashar Khassawneh, Ayoub Alsarhan +4 more

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly integrated into Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems for applications such as surveillance, disaster response, environmental monitoring, and logistics. These missions demand reliable and secure communication between UAVs and cloud platforms for command, control, and data storage. However, UAV communication channels are highly vulnerable to eavesdropping, spoofing, and man-in-the-middle attacks due to their wireless and often long-range nature. Traditional cryptographic schemes either impose excessive computational overhead on resource-constrained UAVs or lack sufficient robustness for cloud-level security. To address this challenge, we propose a dual-layer encryption architecture that balances lightweight efficiency with strong cryptographic guarantees. Unlike prior dual-layer approaches, the proposed framework introduces a context-aware adaptive lightweight layer for UAV-to-gateway communication and a hybrid post-quantum layer for gateway-to-cloud security, enabling dynamic cipher selection, energy-aware key scheduling, and quantum-resilient key establishment. In the first layer, UAV-to-gateway communication employs a lightweight symmetric encryption scheme optimized for low latency and minimal energy consumption. In the second layer, gateway-to-cloud communication uses post-quantum asymmetric encryption to ensure resilience against emerging quantum threats. The architecture is further reinforced with optional multi-path hardening and blockchain-assisted key lifecycle management to enhance scalability and tamper-proof auditability. Experimental evaluation using a UAV testbed and cloud integration shows that the proposed framework achieves 99.85% confidentiality preservation, reduces computational overhead on UAVs by 42%, and improves end-to-end latency by 35% compared to conventional single-layer encryption schemes. These results confirm that the proposed adaptive and hybridized dual-layer design provides a scalable, secure, and resource-aware solution for UAV-to-cloud communication, offering both present-day practicality and future-proof cryptographic resilience.

Ramani Kasarapu, B. Venkata Sivaiah, Rohith Enjety +3 more

Zhang Cao, Teng Cheng, Qin Shi +3 more

With the rapid development of integrated vehicle-road-cloud systems, RoadSide Units (RSUs) have become crucial for communication in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). However, RSU failures disrupt real-time vehicle-to-cloud connectivity, exacerbating traffic congestion and safety risks. Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a promising solution for temporary mobile base stations due to their rapid deployment and flexibility. Nevertheless, the open and dynamic nature of UAV-vehicle communication networks presents critical challenges in achieving both secure communication and lightweight authentication. Furthermore, the unsupervised deployment environment of UAVs makes them particularly vulnerable to physical attacks. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a secure and lightweight UAV-assisted vehicle authentication scheme based on quantum key. The scheme leverages quantum keys, hash functions and XOR to ensure secrecy and traceability of malicious entities. Utilising the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and fuzzy extractor to resist physical attacks. A private blockchain architecture is implemented for secure data storage and management. We verify the scheme’s security using the real-or-random (ROR) oracle model and the Scyther tool. The experimental results show that, compared to other schemes, our scheme has a lower overhead, with an average packet loss rate reduction of 11.42% – 28.8% and an average communication delay reduction of 14.41%–63%.