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Automotive Engineering ›› 2025, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (8): 1459-1467.doi: 10.19562/j.chinasae.qcgc.2025.08.003

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Quantum Key-Based UAV-Assisted Vehicle Authentication Scheme

Teng Cheng1(),Ziang Cao1,Xianli Xie2,Xinyu Hong2,Ze Yang1,Qin Shi1   

  1. 1.School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering,Hefei University of Technology,Hefei 230009
    2.Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. ,Ltd. ,Chongqing 400023
  • Received:2024-12-18 Revised:2025-02-01 Online:2025-08-25 Published:2025-08-18
  • Contact: Teng Cheng E-mail:cht616@hfut.edu.cn

Abstract:

With the rapid development of vehicle-road-cloud integration, Road Side Units (RSUs) have become increasingly significant in communication within Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). When RSUs malfunction, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), leveraging their rapid deployment and flexibility, can swiftly serve as temporary mobile base stations. Given the open and dynamically changing network structure for communication between UAVs and vehicles, achieving secure communication and lightweight authentication is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed. Therefore, in this paper a hybrid encryption method based on quantum symmetric keys and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) is proposed to ensure the security of information transmission and enable tracing of malicious UAVs or vehicle identities. Performance analysis shows that, compared to other lightweight authentication schemes, the proposed solution reduces computational overhead by approximately 5.82%-63.28% for vehicles and by around 43.98%-65.98% for UAVs.

Key words: quantum key, VANET, identity authentication, PUF