Enhanced EAADE: a quantum-resilient and privacy-preserving authentication protocol for secure data exchange in...

The rapid growth of vehicular social networks (VSNs) within the social internet of vehicles (SIoV) ecosystem has introduced critical demands for secure, privacy-preserving, and quantum-resilient data exchange mechanisms. Existing authentication protocols often rely on traditional cryptographic primitives such as elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and bilinear pairings, both of which rely on the hardness of discrete logarithm and pairing problems. These assumptions are efficiently solvable using Shor’s quantum algorithm, rendering ECC and bilinear schemes insecure in the presence of quantum adversaries. To address these limitations, we propose a novel enhanced effective authentication approach for data exchange (EAADE), a lattice-based authentication protocol that integrates ephemeral pseudonymization, spatial cloaking, and federated learning to enable secure model sharing among vehicles without exposing sensitive data. The protocol provides mutual authentication among vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and the main server while ensuring forward secrecy, post-quantum security, and strong anonymity. Security is validated using both formal automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) and informal analysis, confirming resistance to Sybil, replay, man-in-the-middle (MITM), and de-anonymization attacks. Extensive simulations using OMNeT++, SUMO, and federated learning frameworks show that enhanced EAADE reduces computation cost by 44.96%, communication overhead by 22.16%, authentication delay by 17.65%, and packet loss by 23.64%, compared to existing schemes. These results demonstrate the protocol’s efficiency, scalability, and readiness for next-generation vehicular networks.