Lightweight Handover Authentication Scheme for 5G-based V2X Communications

With the development of 5G-based Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communications, many emerging applications have been prospered. However, either of them requires V2X communications to provide secure, reliable, and efficient handover authentication with low computation overheads. It becomes extremely challenging when vehicles move with frequent handovers. In this paper, a lightweight handover authentication scheme is proposed for 5G-based V2X communications. Specifically, each vehicle can initially acquire a temporary encrypted identity from a network function virtualization (NFV)-manager in its home public land mobile network (PLMN). This encrypted identity is used to authenticate the vehicle to the new PLMN when a handover occurs. By comparing with two previous schemes, simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves over 50% less computation overhead than those achieved in both of them, while does not affected the overall network handover latency much. Additionally, the proposed scheme can thwart both inside and outside network attacks well.