RSMA: Reputation System-Based Lightweight Message Authentication Framework and Protocol for 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks

Traditional public key infrastructure-based authentication schemes provide vehicular networks with identity authentication and conditional privacy protection, which are not sufficient for assessing the credibility of messages. Additionally, although the new generation of cellular networks (5G) can dramatically improve the transmission efficiency of the messages, many existing authentication schemes are based on complex bilinear pairing operations, and the calculation time is too long to be suitable for delay-sensitive 5G-enabled vehicular networks. To address these issues, we propose a reputation system-based lightweight message authentication framework and protocol for 5G-enabled vehicular networks. The trusted authority (TA) is in charge of reputation management. A vehicle with a reputation score below the given threshold cannot obtain a credit reference from the TA for participating in the communication; therefore, the number of untrusted messages in vehicular networks is reduced from the source. Security analysis shows that our scheme is secure against an adaptively chosen-message attack, and also satisfies a series of requirements of vehicular networks. The scheme is based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem and supports batch authentication; therefore, it shows better performance in terms of time consumption when compared with related schemes.