Lightweight and Space-efficient Vehicle Authentication based on Cuckoo Filter

While the emerging vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity paradigm is radically transforming the automotive sector, unprecedented security challenges arise, calling for innovative security enablers with minimum impact on the ongoing communication. In dense V2X scenarios, the 5G authentication and key agreement (5G-AKA) procedure may suffer from uncontrolled failures which result in unacceptable latency levels due to the excessive signalling overhead. In this paper, we introduce a lightweight vehicle authentication scheme, as an extension of the 5G-AKA, to adequately address a high number of authentication requests. The proposed mechanism leverages the space-efficient features of the cuckoo filter, a probabilistic data structure for approximate set membership tests, to achieve authentication of multiple vehicles at a time. Our performance analysis reveals the impact of various cuckoo filter parameter configurations on the authentication efficiency. In addition, our proposed authentication mechanism is able to outperform the standardized 5G-AKA procedure in terms of latency and protocol overhead even for high vehicle load.