Secure and Efficient Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for 5G Software Defined Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks provide various applications for vehicles to improve road safety and traffic efficiency as well as infotainment. Security and privacy are of great importance for the deployment of vehicular networks. However, how to efficiently secure vehicular networks with privacy-preserving remains a big challenge. Many solutions have been proposed in the past decade, but most of them either rely too much on the ideal tamper-proofed devices or not being efficient enough for scenarios with high vehicle density. Meanwhile, in recent years, great progresses have been made in both the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and the fifth-generation (5G) wireless network based vehicular networks. The 5G enabled vehicular networks are envisioned to support higher data transmission rate and a larger number of connected devices than the 802.11p and LTE based networks. Noting the great potential of 5G technology, in this paper we explore a new architecture of 5G software defined vehicular network and propose a secure and efficient privacy preserving authentication scheme for vehicular networks. The proposed scheme uses elliptic-curve public-key cryptography and a registration list to achieve efficient message authentication and to avoid the usage of ever-growing certificate revocation list. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme has strong security guarantees without using the ideal tamper-proofed devices. Simulation results exhibit that the proposed scheme has ultra low computational overhead and packet loss ratio.