Lightweight Group Authentication with Dynamic Vehicle-Clustering for 5G-Based V2X Communications

For 5G based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications, it is envisioned that the network latency will be dramatically decreased to the extent of 1msec. However, achieving such low latency with high mobility in vehicular networks is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a lightweight group authentication scheme for 5G- based V2X communications using three different vehicles' roles in each cluster: an ordinary vehicle, Cluster Head (CH), and gateway vehicle. To increase cluster connectivity time, our clustering algorithm is developed based on three metrics: cluster's relative velocity, relative position, and received signal strength. The proposed authentication scheme aims to mutually authenticate the vehicle and CH as well as create a shared group key to be used inside the cluster. The security analysis and performance evaluation show that our proposed scheme thwarts inside and outside authentication attacks, and achieves up to 50% less computation overhead than those achieved in the existing schemes.