LSHA: A Lightweight and Secure Handover Authentication Scheme Based on Wireless Key for 5G-V2X

The advent of 5G-V2X technology has significantly enhanced the capabilities of Connected Automated Vehicles (CAVs). However, in high-mobility 5G-based vehicular network scenarios, CAVs need to frequently handover between base stations. Inadequate handover authentication schemes pose many security threats, including impersonation attacks, man-in-themiddle attacks, and desynchronization attacks, among others. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight and secure handover authentication scheme called LSHA, which leverages physical layer wireless key generation (PLKG) technology to produce highly random temporary keys for handovers, preventing the leakage of critical parameters to potential attackers in the wireless network. Moreover, LSHA achieve mutual authentication between CAVs and base stations while ensuring message freshness using randomly generated numbers. Additionally, the use of temporary identity variable (CID) guarantees the privacy and untraceability of CAVs. Finally, we formally prove the security of the proposed scheme using the Scyther tool and compare the communication overhead, authentication delay, and robustness of different handover schemes through simulations. Compared to the standard 5 G handover authentication scheme, LSHA reduces the transmitted data by 29%, lowers communication delay by 31.8%, and even under unknown attacks, reduces the average data for successful handovers by 25.38%, demonstrating significant performance and security advantages.