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: i) Role-based data access control strategy. Access to private data requires authorization and management by vehicle owners. ii) 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 multi-level quantum keys. The multi-level quantum key includes the quantum pre-filled key, the quantum protection key and the quantum session key. iii) 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.

Near-field communication in VANETs can effectively reduce communication overhead compared to peer-to-peer communication. However, there is still plenty of room for improvements to be made to ensure identity authentication privacy protection and to enhance the security and efficiency of key distributions during transmissions. Therefore, this paper proposes an anonymous identity authentication and group key distribution scheme based on quantum random numbers. In the proposed scheme, (1) anonymous credentials for vehicles are generated by a combination of random numbers on the vehicle side and random numbers in the TA, and mutual recognition of vehicles and roadside identity is achieved through the TA in the form of zero-knowledge proof, which achieves privacy protection for the vehicle during authentication. (2) A combined key generation method was devised. The roadside and the TA in this case jointly generate the group key. The TA uses a previously filled quantum key to encrypt the group session key parameter GSPc generated by its quantum random number generator to ensure security, and the roadside obtains the group session key parameter GSPr by calculating the anonymous credentials of all legitimate vehicles to achieve fast updates of the group session key. This scheme achieves forward and backward security while guaranteeing one-at-a-time encryption. The signaling and computation overheads were calculated, and the signaling overhead was reduced by nearly half. In addition, the group key issuance time was significantly reduced compared with other schemes. Through formal security analysis and experimental verification, the security and feasibility of this protocol were proved.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology has recently emerged as a popular area of research, and vehicle-to-cloud communication forms the basis of the IoV. This process involves uploading a large amount of information related to the vehicle and its location. The security of vehicle-to-cloud communication thus has a significant impact on the safety of the IoV. This paper proposes a vehicle-to-cloud communication system based on lightweight authentication and extended Quantum Key Distribution. The system supports the wireless distribution of session keys between vehicles and the Quantum Cloud Server (QCS) by using a WAN (Wide Area Network), and supports the wired transmission of quantum keys between the QCS and the Telematics Service Provider (TSP) through a LAN (Local Area Network) by using the BB84 protocol. The system can implement encrypted communication based on quantum physical security in a hybrid network. Moreover, we propose a lightweight identity authentication scheme. An analysis of its performance shows that the proposed system requires a small amount of computation and incurs a low communication overhead. This scheme is applicable to most Internet devices with low computing and communication capacity, and can potentially be used in the IoV framework. We conducted simulations of the proposed system and experiments to test its performance. The maximum average delay in communication in experiments was 40.681 ms and the maximum rate of packet loss was 0.1222%. The proposed system can thus ensure safe and efficient IoV communication.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and Intelligent Transportation, connected vehicles can access a variety of latency-sensitive cloud services to improve real-time road traffic conditions, driving safety and driving comfort. However, as the number of cloud service providers (CSPs) increases, vehicles and CSPs should efficiently complete authentication to ensure consistency and timeliness of IoV services. Moreover, many services are realized via public wireless channels, which are vulnerable to various security attacks and threats. Therefore, this paper proposes a secure and efficient authentication scheme for blockchain-enabled IoV based on quantum key distribution (QKD), called QBMA-BIV. The QBMA-BIV supports efficient authentication and re-authentication between vehicles and multiple servers through the lightweight signature algorithm and the quantum authentication keys. In QBMA-BIV, the authentication phase is achieved based on the QKD network and blockchain assistance, which is not dependent on third-party trusted centers and avoids the threat of a single point of failure. Furthermore, the security analysis demonstrates that QBMA-BIV could resist potential security attacks. Performance analysis also shows that QBMA-BIV could reduce computation and communication costs by 78.58 $\%$ – 86.87 $\%$ and 38.39 $\%$ -81.91 $\%$ compared to related schemes. Simulation and experiments show that QBMA-BIV has outstanding feasibility.