Experimental Evaluation of Post-Quantum Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving V2X Communication

Abstract: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) fundamentally rely on vehicle-generated data for applications such as congestion monitoring and route optimization, making the preservation of user privacy a critical challenge. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) offers a promising solution by enabling computation on encrypted data without revealing underlying content. This study presents the first real-world experimental evaluation of three post-quantum secure HE schemes, i.e., Brakerski-Fan-Vercauteren (BFV), Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BGV), and Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS), for vehicular communication scenarios. Two representative privacy-preserving use cases are considered: encrypted vehicle counting and average speed aggregation. Experiments are conducted over both Wi-Fi and Ethernet to assess performance under wireless and wired vehicle-to-everything (V2X) settings. Results show that BFV and BGV are suitable for latency-tolerant applications such as intersection monitoring and regional traffic analysis, with total end-to-end latencies under 10 seconds. While CKKS experiences higher overhead, it remains viable for periodic encrypted aggregation of numerical data. The experimental results demonstrate that HE can be feasibly deployed in ITS environments under 128-bit post-quantum security, provided that scheme-specific latency constraints are considered. This reinforces its potential to serve as a foundational tool for secure and privacy-preserving V2X data processing.