Q-ShielD: Quantum-Enhanced Secure Framework for Autonomous Vehicles Communication

The transportation system has seen rapid evolution with the coming of Industry 4.0. Self-driving cars and intelligent traffic control have replaced manually driven vehicles and the conventional traffic management system. To enhance their performance, these entities continuously need to exchange data amongst themselves regarding their position, speed, direction, obstacles on the road, traffic signal state and weather conditions. This data can be intercepted by any malicious eavesdropper and the entire smart transportation system can be compromised. To ensure secure and reliable communication among these autonomous vehicles and road infrastructure quantum communication is used. In the proposed Q-ShielD framework, two such quantum protocols are implemented, namely BB84 Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and the Continuous Variable quantum protocol. The two protocols differ in the way they send the transmitted data. It was found that the Continuous Variable QKD performed better over BB84 in terms of Key Generation Rate, Quantum Bit Error Rate, and Distance covered in regular weather conditions.