  Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) marked a pronounced change in the
Intelligent Transport System and Smart Cities through seamless vehicle
communication to intensify safety and efficacy. However, a few authentication
schemes have been devised in the literature to ensure the authenticity of the
source and information in the post-quantum era. The most popular base for such
construction is lattice-based cryptography. However, existing lattice-based
authentication schemes fall short of addressing the potential challenges of the
leakage of the master secret key and key-escrow problem. By ingeniously
addressing both issues, the paper proposes the \emph{first} quantum secure
authentication scheme to eliminate the flaws while maintaining the system's
overall efficiency intact. Compared to the state-of-the-art schemes, the
provable security and overall performance assessment highlight the suitability
of the proposed approach.
