Dynamic and Secure Group Authentication for 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks

The emergence of 5G technology has revolutionized vehicular networks, enabling high-speed, ultra-reliable, and low-latency vehicle-to-everything communication. However, ensuring secure and scalable group authentication remains a critical challenge, particularly in dynamic vehicular environments prone to cyber threats. In this paper, we propose a novel authentication protocol for 5G-enabled vehicular networks that leverages hybrid chaotic maps and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to provide robust security with minimal computational overhead. The proposed scheme enables dynamic group key management, ensuring seamless authentication as vehicles join or leave the network while maintaining efficiency and scalability. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing authentication protocols, analyzing their security, computational efficiency, and scalability, and identify key limitations. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges in developing a fully secure and adaptive authentication framework for large-scale vehicular networks and propose potential solutions to enhance security, performance, and real-time communication in 5G-enabled intelligent transportation systems.