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.
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.
Energy Internet is well-known nowadays for enabling bidirectional V2G communication; however, with communication and computation abilities, V2G systems become vulnerable to cyber-attacks and unauthorised access. An authentication protocol verifies the identity of an entity, establishes trust, and allows access to authorized resources while preventing unauthorized access. Research challenges for vehicle-to-grid authentication protocols include quantum security, privacy, resilience to attacks, and interoperability. The majority of authentication protocols in V2G systems are based on public-key cryptography and depend on some hard problems like integer factorization and discrete logs to guarantee security, which can be easily broken by a quantum adversary. Besides, ensuring both information security and entity privacy is equally crucial in V2G scenarios. Consequently, this work proposes a quantum-secured privacy-preserving key authentication and communication (QSKA) protocol using superdense coding and a hash function for unconditionally secure V2G communication and privacy. QSKA uses a password-based authentication mechanism, enabling V2G entities to securely transfer passwords using superdense coding. The QSKA security verification is performed in proof-assistant Coq. The security analysis and performance evaluation of the QSKA show its resiliency against well-known security attacks and reveal its enhanced reliability and efficiency with respect to state-of-the-art protocols in terms of computation, communication, and energy overhead.
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.
The incorporation of Electric Vehicles into smart grid networks poses great cybersecurity threats, especially with respect to the secure authentication of devices and communications between charging stations, electric vehicles, and grid operators. Conventional cryptography methods like RSA and ECC are susceptible to quantum computing attacks, which call for the implementation of post-quantum cryptography in order to make these systems quantum-resistant. This paper discusses need and imminence of post-quantum cryptography-based authentication mechanisms for improving the security of smart grid infrastructure that facilitates Electric Vehicles operation and charging stations. It introduces the existing authentication protocols, their shortcomings from a quantum threat perspective, and suggests a framework using quantum-resistant algorithms for authenticating devices, exchanging keys, and ensuring data integrity. Moreover, we tackle scalability, efficiency, and standardization issues regarding the deployment of PQC-based solutions in large-scale smart grid settings. This research identifies the compelling need for secure, quantum-resistant authentication systems to protect the increasing overlap of electric vehicles and smart grid networks, with a view to maintaining secure, reliable, and future-proof energy infrastructures.
V2G technology enables bidirectional energy transfer from EVs to the grid. It is possible to use the grid to charge EVs and to use EVs to charge the grid during peak grid hours, thus alleviating the problem of grid load fluctuations and improving grid efficiency. Many traditional authentication protocols have been proposed to protect V2G. However, the rapid development of high-speed Internet and the race to organize the development of quantum computers are a great threat to the existing authentication schemes. Therefore, traditional authentication protocols are vulnerable to attacks in the era of quantum computing. In this paper, I propose an extended chaotic mapping-based authentication and quantum key distribution scheme to defend against quantum attacks and prevent known traditional security attacks. The proposed extended chaotic mapping-based authentication protocol is secure under the real or random (ROR) model. Also, experimental results demonstrate that our protocol is lightweight compared to existing authentication protocols, as listed in the performance analysis section. The comparative analysis shows that the protocol is suitable for practical implementation in a quantum environment.
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%.
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.