Lightweight Quantum-Resistant Blockchain-Based Key Agreement Scheme for IoV Communications

Abstract

Smart transportation networks have the potential to significantly improve traffic flow. The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) serves as a vital component of such networks, enabling real-time connectivity and coordination among vehicles and infrastructure. The expansion of IoV-based communication and the increasing volume of data transferred across the IoV make it necessary to implement effective techniques for preserving privacy and ensuring information security. Nonetheless, traditional data-security models have notable drawbacks, primarily high computational costs. In our pseudonymous authentication framework, each vehicle first generates a public–private key pair using a multidimensional lattice-based (Nth-degree truncated polynomial ring units) method. A vehicle then digitally signs its own identity with its private key and sends an authentication request to the roadside unit (RSU); the RSU then verifies that signature using the public key of the corresponding vehicle. After verification, the vehicle and RSU execute a secure ephemeral-key agreement using ephemeral supersingular isogeny Diffie–Hellman to establish a shared session key. The complete authentication and session-key-agreement process is securely signed and documented on the blockchain using a lightweight enhanced delegated proof-of-stake consensus methodology to efficiently confirm the transaction and add it to the blockchain. The experimental findings show that the proposed system incurs a computational cost of 12.1 ms and a communication cost of 1184 bits. Furthermore, smart contracts are deployed on the Remix virtual machine to showcase the functionality of the proposed system within a decentralized blockchain environment. The smart contract execution costs are (681,713), (734,851), and (870,301) for the RSU registry, vehicle registry, and session AuthTrust, respectively. The proposed scheme is comparatively evaluated against existing frameworks, namely PBSCF-ITS, AAKE-BIVT, IIoT-QRSCA, and BASF-ITS, using several metrics, including both computational and communication costs. The effectiveness and security of the proposed model are also verified through a security analysis. The results confirm that the proposed system outperforms similar existing baseline models.