@Article{cmc.2026.087148,
AUTHOR = {Lasseni Coulibaly, Damien Hanyurwimfura, Evariste Twahirwa, Abubakar Diwani},
TITLE = {A Lightweight Quantum-Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks},
JOURNAL = {Computers, Materials \& Continua},
VOLUME = {},
YEAR = {},
NUMBER = {},
PAGES = {{pages}},
URL = {http://www.techscience.com/cmc/online/detail/27983},
ISSN = {1546-2226},
ABSTRACT = {Intelligent transportation systems, a critical pillar for smart cities, enable real-time vehicular communications to prevent human errors and improve traffic safety and efficiency. However, the open and highly dynamic nature of vehicular networks exposes them to various security threats, including message tampering, impersonation, and privacy violations. Several authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols have been proposed to mitigate these risks, but often fail to maintain future-proof security against emerging quantum threats or introduce significant latency that affects real-time applications by relying on computationally expensive public-key cryptography, blockchain or centralized architectures. This paper proposes a new AKA protocol that combines hash-based operations with the Blom’s key pre-distribution scheme and the standardized Module-Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) to achieve lightweight and quantum-secure mutual vehicular authentications in a decentralized architecture. Formal security verifications together with informal security analysis demonstrate resistance against common network attacks, while performance evaluations confirm reduced computational costs up to 99.95% and communication overhead reductions from 8.46% to 87.08% compared with related methods. Moreover, NS-3 simulations under varying densities and mobility conditions demonstrate high packet delivery reliability, low end-to-end authentication latency, and excellent scalability, making the proposed protocol a practical solution for next-generation quantum-secure vehicular networks.},
DOI = {10.32604/cmc.2026.087148}
}