A security-enhanced authentication scheme for quantum-key-distribution (QKD) enabled Internet of vehicles in multi-cloud environment

The Internet of vehicles (IoV) is an essential part of modern intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In the ITS, intelligent connected vehicle can access a variety of latency-sensitive cloud services through the vulnerable wireless communication channel, which could lead to security and privacy issues. To prevent access by malicious nodes, a large number of authentication schemes have been proposed. However, with the diversification of cloud services and the rapid development of quantum computing, there are many drawbacks remain, including timeliness of authentication and resisting quantum computing. In light of this, we propose a lattice-based secure and efficient multi-cloud authentication and key agreement scheme for quantum key distribution (QKD) enabled IoV. Its features are as follows: i) Security-enhanced and Efficient Authentication: We combine the lattice-based lightweight signatures and quantum authentication keys to guarantee security-enhanced authentication. Meanwhile, we propose the quantum security service cloud (QSC) to manage the authentication of all vehicles and cloud server providers (CSPs) to reduce the authentication rounds and improve efficiency. ii) Extended Quantum Key Distribution (eQKD): In wireless networks, quantum key agreement is achieved through the pre-filled quantum keys. In wired networks, quantum key is accomplished by QKD with Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol. Furthermore, formal and informal security demonstrates that the scheme could resist potential security attacks. The performance comparison illustrates that our scheme could decrease the computational overhead by 27.23%-81.78% and authentication rounds by 81.34%-93.10%.