Towards Resilience 5G-V2N: Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol for Multi-Service Access and Handover
Ye Bi, Chunfu Jia · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2025
The booming 5G cellular networks sparked tremendous interest in supporting more sophisticated critical use cases through vehicle-to-network (V2N) communications. However, the inherent technical vulnerabilities and densification of 5G raise new security and efficiency challenges. The existing secondary authentication fails to support multi-service access. The random access process lacks authentication of the gNB, possibly leading to fake base station attacks (FBS). Moreover, related research extends key forward/backward secrecy (KF/BS) to require that it also applies to gNBs, thus invalidating most existing schemes. This paper introduces a comprehensive security framework for 5G-V2N that seamlessly integrates with existing standardized architecture to provide privacy-preserving mutual authentication and key agreement for the full service cycle. Specifically, we propose new secondary authentication involving gNBs and support single request access to multi-services. Second, incorporating the service migration idea, we design the g2g (gNB-to-gNB) channel establishment phase to promote secure context share. Finally, the proposed efficient handover phase achieves the security properties of enhanced KF/BS, known randomness secrecy and privacy-preserving, and avoids FBS. We verify the proposed protocol using three different formal techniques: provably secure, BAN-logic, and AVISPA tool. Extensive experimental results and comparison show that our scheme excels in computational and communication efficiencies, and detecting malicious events.