PQAKA: Post Quantum Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Intelligent Internet of Vehicles Over 5G
Gunasekaran Raja, Sudhakar Theerthagiri, Kathiroli Raja, Janani Alagar Ramanujam, Tejesshree Sadhasivam, Priyadarshni Vasudevan, A. Paventhan, Sunder Ali Khowaja, Kapal Dev
As Vehicular Networks evolve toward the Intelligent Internet of Vehicles (IoV), ensuring quantum-resilient security has become essential. The current 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol, although well-established, relies on classical cryptographic primitives such as AES, Message Authentication Codes (MACs), and Key Derivation Functions (KDFs), which are increasingly vulnerable to advances in quantum computing. To mitigate this, we propose PQAKA, a Post-Quantum Authentication and Key Agreement protocol tailored for 5G-based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. By integrating the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-standardized Module-Lattice Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM), the proposed scheme achieves mutual authentication and forward secrecy against classical and quantum adversaries while maintaining compatibility with existing Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF)/Authentication Server Function (AUSF)/Unified Data Management (UDM) entities. Mapped to the 5G control plane, the protocol ensures that vehicles are authenticated before accessing Internet-based services such as navigation, traffic & weather updates, and over-the-air software delivery. Formal verification through ProVerif validates the correctness and security guarantees of the PQAKA protocol, while the informal analysis substantiates its resilience against a spectrum of adversarial vectors. Under hostile threat conditions, PQAKA achieves an authentication success rate of 72%, indicating its potential in quantum-resilient vehicular communication architectures.
As Vehicular Networks evolve toward the Intelligent Internet of Vehicles (IoV), ensuring quantum-resilient security has become essential. The current 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol, although well-established, relies on classical cryptographic primitives such as AES, Message Authentication Codes (MACs), and Key Derivation Functions (KDFs), which are increasingly vulnerable to advances in quantum computing. To mitigate this, we propose PQAKA, a Post-Quantum Authentication and Key Agreement protocol tailored for 5G-based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. By integrating the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-standardized Module-Lattice Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM), the proposed scheme achieves mutual authentication and forward secrecy against classical and quantum adversaries while maintaining compatibility with existing Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF)/Authentication Server Function (AUSF)/Unified Data Management (UDM) entities. Mapped to the 5G control plane, the protocol ensures that vehicles are authenticated before accessing Internet-based services such as navigation, traffic & weather updates, and over-the-air software delivery. Formal verification through ProVerif validates the correctness and security guarantees of the PQAKA protocol, while the informal analysis substantiates its resilience against a spectrum of adversarial vectors. Under hostile threat conditions, PQAKA achieves an authentication success rate of 72%, indicating its potential in quantum-resilient vehicular communication architectures.
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.
Fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks support services such as smart healthcare, connected vehicles, smart homes, and the Internet of Things. Because these services exchange important personal and operational data, secure user authentication is essential. The standard 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) protocol helps verify users and establish communication keys, but research has identified concerns including user traceability, attacks by a malicious serving network, and limited protection against future quantum-computing threats. This paper explains these issues in simple terms and reviews two approaches discussed in the selected research article: a hybrid method combining Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with a Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), and a fully post-quantum method based on KEM. The source study reports that both approaches aim to improve authentication security, while the hybrid option uses fewer computational resources. This paper is a literature-based explanation of the published study; it does not claim a new protocol or independent experimental results
5G serves as a catalyst for transformative digital innovation by enabling convergence with various services in our daily lives. The success of this paradigm shift undeniably hinges on robust security measures, with primary authentication— securing access to the 5G network—being paramount. Two protocols, 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) and the Extensible Authentication Protocol for Authentication and Key Agreement Prime (EAP-AKA’), have been standardized for this purpose, with the former designed for 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) devices and the latter for non-3GPP devices. However, recent studies have exposed vulnerabilities in the 5G-AKA protocol, rendering it susceptible to security breaches, including linkability attacks. Furthermore, the advent of quantum computing poses significant quantum threats, underscoring the urgent need for the adoption of quantum-resistant cryptographic mechanisms. Although post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is being standardized, the lack of real-world deployment limits its proven robustness. In contrast, conventional cryptographic schemes have demonstrated reliability over decades of practical application. To address this gap, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has initiated the standardization of hybrid PQC algorithms (HPQC), combining classical and quantum-resistant techniques. Consequently, ensuring forward secrecy and resilience to quantum threats in the 5G-AKA protocol is critical. To address these security challenges, we propose the 5G-AKA-HPQC protocol. Our protocol is designed to maintain compatibility with existing standards while enhancing security by combining keys negotiated via the Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) with those derived from a PQC-Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM). To rigorously and comprehensively validate the security of 5G-AKA-HPQC, we employ formal verification tools such as SVO Logic and ProVerif. The results confirm the protocol’s security and correctness. Furthermore, performance evaluations highlight the computational and communication overheads inherent to 5G-AKA-HPQC. With only average of 56.5 millisecond(+112.32%) on a total authentication time, proposed protocol provides its advantages. Also, on a environment of multiple UE registration, compared to single UE registration, the difference of increased rate of average authentication time is only 0.01%. The negligible difference 0.01% indicates that the addition of PQC does not lead to increased overhead in multi-UE registration environments, demonstrating its scalability and practical feasibility. In conclusion, our research provides significant insights into the design of secure, quantum-safe authentication protocols and lays the groundwork for the future standardization of secure authentication and key agreement protocols for mobile telecommunications.
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.
Advancements in 5G are largely driven by its adoption across a variety of applications, including smart homes, smart healthcare, autonomous vehicles, transportation, and Industry 5.0. However, this widespread usage raises significant security and privacy concerns, particularly regarding authentication. To secure 5G communications, 3GPP has standardised the 5G-Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) protocol. Despite this, state-of-the-art research has revealed that 5G-AKA suffers from several vulnerabilities. In response, numerous alternative authentication schemes have been proposed. Nevertheless, many of these protocols continue to be susceptible to classical security threats, such as malicious serving network (SN) attacks, ephemeral secret leakage, traceability, anonymity violations, and, most critically, a lack of Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Additionally, recent advancements in quantum computing pose a substantial risk to the security of 5G-AKA and its variants, rendering them insecure in the post-quantum era. Although a few post-quantum cryptography-based protocols have been introduced, studies show that they are either computationally expensive or still vulnerable to quantum attacks. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose two versions of a novel authentication protocol that not only provide comprehensive security guarantees but are also computationally efficient. Version 1 utilises a hybrid cryptographic approach (AES + KEM) and achieves the lowest computational cost—even lower than Version 2, which relies solely on KEM. Both versions offer the same level of security, but Version 1 is significantly more efficient in terms of resource usage. We have validated our proposed protocols using the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model and the Scyther tool. Furthermore, we evaluated their performance against existing protocols under both known and unknown attack scenarios. The results show that our protocols incur lower computational, communication, and energy overhead, as well as strong resilience against unknown attacks, outperforming several existing authentication schemes. Furthermore, we implement a testbed to demonstrate the real-time applicability of both proposed versions.
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.