Transitioning to Quantum-Resistant Infrastructure: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Lattice-Based Anonymous Authentication in Vehicle-to-Grid Networks

Abstract

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks facilitate energy transfer between power grids and electric vehicles (EVs) in a bidirectional process, but these networks face considerable security challenges including authentication, privacy, and vulnerability to quantum computing attacks. Existing protocols provide effective and anonymous authentication, though are open to quantum attacks, and do not sufficiently respond to advanced threats. We propose a post-quantum authentication protocol for V2G based on lattice-based cryptography and certificateless aggregate signcryption. The protocol is quantum resistant, credential revocation is supported, and protects against advanced attacks such as quantum attacks, advanced man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, credential compromise and others. We provide formal security proofs with the use of the random oracle model and compare our protocol with the original ECC-based protocol and other recent V2G authentication schemes from 2024 to 2026. The results indicate that, though our protocol runs about 1.8x the computational burden of pure ECC algorithms, it offers quantum immunity, higher levels of security, and is usable in a real-world V2G scenario. It decreases communication overheads by 22 percent compared to other post-quantum V2G systems, due to aggregate signcryption, which is highly beneficial for the resource constrained vehicle environment to achieve post-quantum security.