Autonomous UPQ-PAKE Quantum-Resistant Vehicular Network Scheme

Abstract

Vehicular networks require privacy-preserving and secure authentication mechanisms to protect safety-critical communications against evolving cyber threats. Conventional authentication schemes relying on elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) and RSA are vulnerable to quantum attacks, making them unsuitable for next-generation intelligent transportation systems. This paper proposes a unified post-quantum pseudonymous authentication and key establishment (UPQ-PAKE) scheme for secure vehicular networks. The proposed framework integrates dynamic pseudonymous identity construction, post-quantum digital signatures, and dual ephemeral key encapsulation into a single transcript-bound authenticated key exchange protocol. ML-DSA is employed for mutual authentication, while ML-KEM enables quantum-resistant session key establishment. Dynamic session-specific pseudonyms provide identity privacy and unlinkability. Furthermore, transcript binding, nonce freshness verification, and contributory dual-ephemeral session entropy strengthen the protocol against replay attacks, provide forward secrecy, and resist man-in-the-middle attacks under the quantum polynomial-time adversarial model. Formal security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme achieves authenticated key exchange security based on the IND-CCA security of ML-KEM and the EUF-CMA security of ML-DSA. Performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed authentication technique maintains practical computational and communication overhead and provides post-quantum mutual authentication, dual-directional key establishment, and dynamic unlinkability, making it suitable for large-scale, real-time IoV deployments.