Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) form the foundational communication framework of intelligent transportation systems, facilitating low-latency, vehicle-to-everything data exchange for enhanced traffic efficiency and safety. Accordingly, ensuring secure, efficient, and scalable authentication is essential to maintain communication trustworthiness, especially in highly dynamic and dense traffic scenarios. While traditional public key cryptography (PKC)-based solutions offer strong security guarantees, they are computationally intensive and struggle to scale under VANET workloads. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel lightweight handover authentication scheme that integrates pairing-based cryptography with symmetric key primitives to ensure message integrity, anonymity, and unlinkability. The proposed solution is deployed within a real-world Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)-assisted communication environment, enhancing the robustness and feasibility of the authentication process during handover. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation is conducted, comparing the computational and communication overhead of the proposed scheme with existing cryptographic protocols. Results demonstrate the superior scalability and efficiency of the proposed approach, making it well-suited for next-generation VANET applications.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have enabled numerous inventive solutions to multiple problems, considerably facilitating our daily lives; however, UAVs frequently rely on an open wireless channel for communication, making them susceptible to cyber-physical threats. Also, UAVs cannot execute complicated cryptographic algorithms due to their limited onboard computing capabilities. Balancing high-security levels and minimum computation costs is imperative when developing a security solution for UAVs. Consequently, several proxy signature schemes have been proposed in the literature to fulfill these requirements. Nevertheless, many of these solutions face the issue of high computation costs, and some exhibit security vulnerabilities that could not be more feasible options for UAV communication. Considering these constraints in mind, in this article, we introduce an improvised certificate-based proxy signature scheme (ICPS), which leverages the concept of hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC) to meet the security and efficiency requirements of UAV networks. The proposed ICPS scheme offers a range of notable features, including its ability to address key escrow and secret key distribution issues. The proposed ICPS scheme’s security hardness has been evaluated using the widely known security tool, the random oracle model (ROM), proving its resilience against known and unknown cybersecurity threats. Finally, this study conducts a performance comparison of the proposed scheme against existing schemes, emphasizing its outstanding cost-efficiency. Notably, the computation cost is measured at 5.3536 ms and the communication cost at 1120 bits, substantially lower than relevant existing schemes.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in beyond 5G (B5G) are crucial for revolutionizing various industries, including surveillance, agriculture, and logistics, by enabling high-speed data transfer, ultra-low latency communication, and ultra-reliable connectivity. However, integrating UAVs into B5G networks poses various security and privacy concerns. These risks encompass the possibility of unauthorized access, breaches of data, and cyber-physical attacks which jeopardize the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of UAV operations. Moreover, UAVs in B5G networks are also at high risk from the application of machine learning (ML)-based attacks by exploiting vulnerabilities in ML models, leading to adversarial manipulation, data poisoning and model evasion techniques, which can compromise the integrity of UAV operations, lead to navigation errors, and expose sensitive data collected by UAVs. Considering the aforementioned security and privacy concerns, this review article presents emerging security and privacy solutions for UAVs in B5G networks. Firstly, We introduce the essential background of integrating UAVs into B5G networks and discuss the advantages and security challenges which the emerging integrated network architecture have. Then, we proceed to analyze and examine the security and privacy landscape by including threats and requirements of UAVs in B5G networks. Based on these threats and requirements, solutions from physical layer security (PLS), blockchain (BC), federated learning (FL) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) are discussed and explored in details. Moreover, potential future research directions are discussed in details as open research issues.

Fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks have led to the implementation of beyond 5G (B5G) networks, which are capable of incorporating autonomous services to swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They provide capacity expansion strategies to address massive connectivity issues and guarantee ultra-high throughput and low latency, especially in extreme or emergency situations where network density, bandwidth, and traffic patterns fluctuate. On the one hand, 6G technology integrates AI/ML, IoT, and blockchain to establish ultra-reliable, intelligent, secure, and ubiquitous UAV networks. 6G networks, on the other hand, rely on new enabling technologies such as air interface and transmission technologies, as well as a unique network design, posing new challenges for the swarm of UAVs.Keeping these challenges in mind, this article focuses on the security and privacy, intelligence, and energy-efficiency issues faced by swarms of UAVs operating in 6G mobile network. In this state-of-the-art review, we integrated blockchain and AI/ML with UAV networks utilizing the 6G ecosystem. The key findings are then presented, and potential research challenges are identified. We conclude the review by shedding light on future research in this emerging field of research.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is considered an enhancement of existing vehicular ad-hoc networks, which helps connect mobile vehicles to the Internet of Things (IoT) with the support of 5G networks. To assure the quality-of-service demand by the users, the edge computing paradigm of 5G networks can be incorporated in the IoV environment for supporting compute-intensive applications. The basic safety messages are typically transmitted using a multicast pattern in the IoV-enabled edge computing paradigm. The use of the multicast channel may accelerate the communication process; however, it is prone to various attacks due to the open nature of wireless networks. This article proposes a multimessage and multireceiver signcryption scheme for the multicast channel in a certificateless setting to solve the key escrow problem. The security of the partial private key is dependent on the secure channel, which increases the complexities of the system. Therefore, in the proposed scheme, we introduce a new idea that does not require a secure channel. The key generation center only sends the pseudo partial private key of the users on a public channel. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is based on hyper-elliptic curve cryptography (HECC), which has much smaller key sizes as compared to elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The security proofs and performance comparison for our scheme are carried out. The findings show that the proposed scheme provides high security while using less computational and communication costs.

In this article, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play a key role in improving the safety and reliability of transportation systems, particularly where data traffic is nonhomogeneous and nonstationary. However, heterogeneous data sharing raises plenty of security and privacy concerns, which may keep UAVs out of future intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Some of the well-known security and privacy issues in the UAV-enabled ITS ecosystem include tracking UAVs and vehicle locations, unauthorized access to data, and message modification. Therefore, in this article, we contribute to the sum of knowledge by combining the hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC) techniques, digital signature, and hash function to present a privacy-preserving authentication scheme. The security features of the proposed scheme are assessed using formal security analysis methods, i.e., real-or- random (ROR) oracle model. To examine the performance of the proposed scheme, a comparison with other existing schemes has been carried out. The results reveal that the proposed scheme outperforms its counterpart schemes in terms of computation and communication costs.

Internet of Things (IoT) is the collection of different types of smart objects like mobile phones, sensors, cars, smart cities, smart buildings, and healthcare, which can provide a quality life to humans around the globe. These smart objects sense and produce a huge amount of data for distribution. The current hostcentric networking paradigm is not that scalable to provide a suitable solution to the idea of IoT. For scalable connectivity and efficient distribution, Named Data Networking (NDN) has been envisioned as a promising solution for future internet architecture. On the other hand, the significant issues regarding the adaptation of NDN with IoT possess security concerns such as authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and forward secrecy. As IoT is a heterogeneous environment, it demands a different type of security, according to the environmental situation such as public key infrastructure (PKI), identity-based cryptosystem (IBC), and certificateless cryptosystem (CLC). This paper presents a new concept of CLC to IBC heterogeneous generalized signcryption for the first time to fulfil the prime security requirements of NDN-based IoT. The proposed scheme provides the security properties according to situational needs without disturbing the structural policy of NDN. Considering the resource-constrained nature of IoT, we used a lightweight type of elliptic curve called the hyperelliptic curve cryptosystem which offers the same level of security as that of bilinear pairing and an elliptic curve cryptosystem using a minimum key size. Further, we compare the proposed scheme with recently proposed identity-based as well as certificateless generalized signcryption schemes, and the results give satisfactory outputs in terms of computational and communication resources. Furthermore, we simulate the proposed scheme with Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA), and the results show that our scheme is valid and safe. Additionally, we provide a practical scenario of the proposed on NDN with an IoT-based smart city.