Anonymous and Privacy-Preserving Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation-Based Authentication Scheme for UAV-Assisted Internet of Autonomous Vehicles

The rapid adoption of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) to assist the Internet of Autonomous Vehicles (IoAV) necessitates authentication mechanisms that ensure anonymity, privacy preservation, and quantum resistance while accommodating high mobility and constrained computational resources. However, existing lattice-based authentication schemes for vehicular networks often exhibit high computational complexity, lack anonymity, or are unsuitable for UAV-assisted architectures. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces$\mathrm{P}^{2}$AS-IoAV, an anonymous and privacy-preserving post-quantum authentication scheme that integrates the CRYSTALS-Kyber key encapsulation mechanism with lightweight bitwise XOR operations to achieve enhanced efficiency. The proposed scheme offers mutual authentication, anonymity, and resistance to both classical and quantum attacks, as validated through formal real-or-random security analysis and automated verification using the Scyther tool. Comparative evaluations show that$\mathrm{P}^{2}$AS-IoAV significantly reduces the computational and communication overheads compared with existing post-quantum and lattice-based schemes, while improving security and scalability. The findings presented in this paper demonstrate that the proposed scheme delivers a practical, secure, and quantum-resistant authentication framework that is well-suited to next-generation UAV-assisted vehicular networks.