Quantum-Resilient Blockchain Framework for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) integrate Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and quantum-resistant cryptography to enhance autonomous vehicle operations, urban mobility, and road safety. However, their reliance on heterogeneous communication networks exposes them to cyber threats, including identity spoofing, data tampering, and quantumenabled attacks that compromise security and privacy. To address these challenges, this article proposes a blind quantum computation (BQC)-enhanced identity-based quantum-secure framework, which integrates decentralized authentication, blockchain-based identity verification, and postquantum cryptographic techniques to reduce long-term trust in third parties by eliminating persistent key escrow while mitigating security risks. The framework leverages quantum spin-state mapping and blind quantum encryption to protect against quantum-enabled collision (birthday-type) and key impersonation attacks under the defined adversary model, ensuring tamper-proof and unlinkable transactions in vehicular networks. In addition, a lightweight consensus mechanism optimizes computational efficiency while maintaining high security and scalability. Through private-chain simulations and microbenchmarks, the proposed identity-based quantum signature (IBQS) achieves ∼94.5-s confirmation time for a batch of 600 transactions [≈6:3 transactions per second (TPS)] in off-path audit and enrollment functions while maintaining lightweight cryptographic operations suitable for real-time vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) safety messages (signing ≈2:994 ms; verification ≈1:493 ms). These results position IBQS as a practical and quantum-resilient security solution for nextgeneration decentralized transportation systems.