Near-field communication in VANETs can effectively reduce communication overhead compared to peer-to-peer communication. However, there is still plenty of room for improvements to be made to ensure identity authentication privacy protection and to enhance the security and efficiency of key distributions during transmissions. Therefore, this paper proposes an anonymous identity authentication and group key distribution scheme based on quantum random numbers. In the proposed scheme, (1) anonymous credentials for vehicles are generated by a combination of random numbers on the vehicle side and random numbers in the TA, and mutual recognition of vehicles and roadside identity is achieved through the TA in the form of zero-knowledge proof, which achieves privacy protection for the vehicle during authentication. (2) A combined key generation method was devised. The roadside and the TA in this case jointly generate the group key. The TA uses a previously filled quantum key to encrypt the group session key parameter GSPc generated by its quantum random number generator to ensure security, and the roadside obtains the group session key parameter GSPr by calculating the anonymous credentials of all legitimate vehicles to achieve fast updates of the group session key. This scheme achieves forward and backward security while guaranteeing one-at-a-time encryption. The signaling and computation overheads were calculated, and the signaling overhead was reduced by nearly half. In addition, the group key issuance time was significantly reduced compared with other schemes. Through formal security analysis and experimental verification, the security and feasibility of this protocol were proved.
Near-field communication in VANETs can effectively reduce communication overhead compared to peer-to-peer communication. However, there is still plenty of room for improvements to be made to ensure identity authentication privacy protection and to enhance the security and efficiency of key distributions during transmissions. Therefore, this paper proposes an anonymous identity authentication and group key distribution scheme based on quantum random numbers. In the proposed scheme, (1) anonymous credentials for vehicles are generated by a combination of random numbers on the vehicle side and random numbers in the TA, and mutual recognition of vehicles and roadside identity is achieved through the TA in the form of zero-knowledge proof, which achieves privacy protection for the vehicle during authentication. (2) A combined key generation method was devised. The roadside and the TA in this case jointly generate the group key. The TA uses a previously filled quantum key to encrypt the group session key parameter GSPc generated by its quantum random number generator to ensure security, and the roadside obtains the group session key parameter GSPr by calculating the anonymous credentials of all legitimate vehicles to achieve fast updates of the group session key. This scheme achieves forward and backward security while guaranteeing one-at-a-time encryption. The signaling and computation overheads were calculated, and the signaling overhead was reduced by nearly half. In addition, the group key issuance time was significantly reduced compared with other schemes. Through formal security analysis and experimental verification, the security and feasibility of this protocol were proved.
With the rapid development of quantum computing, in response to its disruptive threats to traditional cryptosystems and the urgent demand for lightweight and highly scalable secure group communication among resource-constrained devices in large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, this paper proposes a lightweight anonymous group authentication scheme that integrates Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), distributed Gossip algorithms, and quantum key distribution. By exploiting the uniqueness and unclonability derived from the inherent physical characteristics of PUF hardware, the scheme fundamentally eliminates attack vectors against quantum computers without requiring devices to pre-store any secret keys in their memory, while the QKCS pre-provisions CRPs and key seeds, which is the standard enrollment procedure in PUF-based systems. Combined with information-theoretically secure quantum keys as session keys, it forms a dual protection mechanism: anti-forgery at the physical layer and anti-quantum attack at the cryptographic layer. Innovatively, the Gossip algorithm is deeply integrated with group key agreement, converting global broadcast into local iterative interactions between nodes, which effectively alleviates broadcast storms and improves the scalability and fault tolerance of the protocol. Meanwhile, a pseudonym mechanism is introduced to achieve anonymous identity protection, and a dynamic key update strategy guarantees forward and backward security when members join or leave the group. Formal verification based on BAN logic and security analysis show that the proposed protocol can resist typical attacks such as replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and impersonation attacks. Performance evaluations demonstrate that our scheme outperforms existing comparable schemes in terms of computational cost, communication overhead, and dynamic group management efficiency, demonstrating its potential for resource-constrained IoT environments, pending further validation on real hardware platforms.
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.
Abstract Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology enables bidirectional communication and energy interaction between electric vehicles and the power grid. To ensure real-time response and secure communication, authentication protocols in V2G must provide privacy protection, maintain lightweight computation, and resist various malicious attacks. However, the advancement of quantum computing poses a significant threat to the security of classical cryptographic systems. Furthermore, as vehicles and charging piles are often exposed in public areas and may operate offline, the information stored within these devices requires robust physical protection.To address these challenges, this paper proposes a PUF-based quantum authentication and key agreement protocol for V2G scenarios, which deeply binds classical PUF responses with quantum gate transformation techniques to achieve an efficient joint verification mechanism. The protocol utilizes quantum channels as tamper-proof transmission media to provide secure verification for pre-shared PUF credentials. By fusing classical and quantum communication with hash functions, the proposed scheme achieves lightweight, anonymous, mutual, and dual-factor identity authentication alongside secure key agreement. This integration ensures both communication security and participant privacy. Security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is lightweight in edge-side classical computation. Under strict system assumptions, it can provide sufficient security and efficiency guarantees for the system, offering a valuable reference solution for V2G networks.
With the rapid development of intelligent connected vehicles, networked vehicles carry a large amount of sensitive data. Secure authentication and controlled access to data in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) are essential to protect vehicular private data. We propose a quantum-key-based authentication and key agreement scheme for IoV, called QKBAKA. Its features are as follows: 1) Role-Based Data Access Control Strategy: Access to private data requires authorization and management by vehicle owners. 2) Vehicle privatization manages quantum session keys. The quantum random number generator (QRNG) deployed on the vehicle side generates quantum session keys and realizes secure agreement through multilevel quantum keys. The multilevel quantum key includes the quantum prefilled key, the quantum protection key and the quantum session key. 3) Secure and Efficient Authentication Scheme: QKBAKA uses quantum keys, symmetric encryption algorithms, and hash algorithms. It is relatively secure for quantum computing and has better performance. Security analysis shows that QKBAKA is secure under the real-or-random (ROR) model and meets the security requirements of IoV. Performance evaluation shows that, compared with the existing schemes, QKBAKA reduces computation and communication costs by 74.83%–98.59% and 28.7%–83.1%. Simulation and real vehicle tests show that QKBAKA has good communication stability and feasibility.
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 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.