Quantum-Secure Certificate-Less Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication for VANET

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) marked a pronounced change in the Intelligent Transport System and Smart Cities through seamless vehicle communication to intensify safety and efficacy. However, a few authentication schemes have been devised in the literature to ensure the authenticity of the source and information in the post-quantum era. The most popular base for such construction is lattice-based cryptography. However, existing lattice-based authentication schemes fall short of addressing the potential challenges of the leakage of the master secret key and key-escrow problem. By ingeniously addressing both issues, the paper proposes the first quantum secure authentication scheme to eliminate the flaws while maintaining the system's overall efficiency intact. Compared to the state-of-the-art schemes, the provable security and overall performance assessment highlight the suitability of the proposed approach.