Paper 2022/483

Drive (Quantum) Safe! – Towards Post-Quantum Security for V2V Communications

Nina Bindel and Sarah McCarthy and Geoff Twardokus and Hanif Rahbari

Abstract

We tackle a challenging problem at the intersection of two emerging technologies: Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Connected vehicles use V2V technology to exchange safety messages that allow them to increase proximity awareness, improving roadway safety. The integrity and authenticity of these messages is critical to prevent an adversary from abusing V2V technology to cause a collision, traffic jam, or other unsafe and/or disruptive situations. The IEEE 1609.2 standard (2016) specifies authentication mechanisms for V2V communications that rely on the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) and are therefore not secure against quantum attackers. In this paper, we are the first to devise and evaluate PQC for authenticating messages in IEEE 1609.2. By analyzing the properties of the NIST PQC standardization finalists, as well as XMSS (RFC 8391), we propose three practical, ECDSA-PQ hybrid designs for use during the transition from classical to PQ-secure cryptography.