Enhancing ZTMAF through federated trust learning, post quantum cryptography integration and seamless cross domain authentication handover

Abstract

Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) has a major role to play in facilitating low-latency and real-time communication in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Nevertheless, there exist major issues in trust management, security, and cross-domain authentication, considering the dynamic nature of vehicular networks. The Zero-Trust Mobility-Aware Authentication Framework (ZTMAF) has been proposed to overcome issues in trust management, security, and cross-domain authentication. Nevertheless, there exist major issues in distributed intelligence, trust transmission, and handover, which have been addressed in this proposed framework. The proposed framework extends ZTMAF with three major advancements: Federated Trust Learning, PQC-inspired Secure Transmission, and Cross-Domain Authentication Handover. The proposed framework uses fog nodes to train a trust model in a distributed setting, allowing for scalability and privacy preservation. Additionally, Post-Quantum Cryptography inspired encryption would be utilized for secure trust transmission, as well as to remain compliant with future post-quantum encryption standards. A token-based handover mechanism will allow vehicles to make use of previously verified trust, thus lowering latency in cross-domain authentication. The proposed framework has been validated via multiple simulation scenarios, and its performance has been evaluated against different types of attacks (e.g., stealth, on/off, Sybil). The results of the evaluations show that trust stability has improved, that detection of behavior-based attacks has improved, and that the use of the token-based handover mechanism has reduced the authentication delay by 45%. The proposed framework represents a secure and scalable solution for next-generation vehicular networks, and it sheds light on the issues associated with detecting Sybil attacks as part of the process.