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SALT-V: Lightweight Authentication for 5G V2X Broadcasting

Liu Cao, Weizheng Wang, Qipeng Xie, Dongyu Wei, Lyutianyang Zhang

TL;DR

SALT-V addresses the need for real-time, secure V2X authentication under 5G NR-V2X by decoupling trust establishment from message verification. It introduces a hybrid scheme that uses 10% BOOT frames with ECDSA signatures to establish sender trust and 90% DATA frames authenticated with lightweight GMAC, enabled by an Ephemeral Session Tag whitelist and Bloom-filter revocation. The approach achieves 0.035 ms average computation, 1 ms end-to-end latency, 41-byte overhead, and scalability to 2000 vehicles, providing immediate verification for 95% of messages while maintaining strong security. This work offers a practical path to real-time, authenticated V2X broadcasting, with modular initialization, credential provisioning, time anchoring, and robust revocation and privacy protections.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication faces a critical authentication dilemma: traditional public-key schemes like ECDSA provide strong security but impose 2 ms verification delays unsuitable for collision avoidance, while symmetric approaches like TESLA achieve microsecond-level efficiency at the cost of 20-100 ms key disclosure latency. Neither meets 5G New Radio (NR)-V2X's stringent requirements for both immediate authentication and computational efficiency. This paper presents SALT-V, a novel hybrid authentication framework that reconciles this fundamental trade-off through intelligent protocol stratification. SALT-V employs ECDSA signatures for 10% of traffic (BOOT frames) to establish sender trust, then leverages this trust anchor to authenticate 90% of messages (DATA frames) using lightweight GMAC operations. The core innovation - an Ephemeral Session Tag (EST) whitelist mechanism - enables 95% of messages to achieve immediate verification without waiting for key disclosure, while Bloom filter integration provides O(1) revocation checking in 1 us. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SALT-V achieves 0.035 ms average computation time (57x faster than pure ECDSA), 1 ms end-to-end latency, 41-byte overhead, and linear scalability to 2000 vehicles, making it the first practical solution to satisfy all safety-critical requirements for real-time V2X deployment.

SALT-V: Lightweight Authentication for 5G V2X Broadcasting

TL;DR

SALT-V addresses the need for real-time, secure V2X authentication under 5G NR-V2X by decoupling trust establishment from message verification. It introduces a hybrid scheme that uses 10% BOOT frames with ECDSA signatures to establish sender trust and 90% DATA frames authenticated with lightweight GMAC, enabled by an Ephemeral Session Tag whitelist and Bloom-filter revocation. The approach achieves 0.035 ms average computation, 1 ms end-to-end latency, 41-byte overhead, and scalability to 2000 vehicles, providing immediate verification for 95% of messages while maintaining strong security. This work offers a practical path to real-time, authenticated V2X broadcasting, with modular initialization, credential provisioning, time anchoring, and robust revocation and privacy protections.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication faces a critical authentication dilemma: traditional public-key schemes like ECDSA provide strong security but impose 2 ms verification delays unsuitable for collision avoidance, while symmetric approaches like TESLA achieve microsecond-level efficiency at the cost of 20-100 ms key disclosure latency. Neither meets 5G New Radio (NR)-V2X's stringent requirements for both immediate authentication and computational efficiency. This paper presents SALT-V, a novel hybrid authentication framework that reconciles this fundamental trade-off through intelligent protocol stratification. SALT-V employs ECDSA signatures for 10% of traffic (BOOT frames) to establish sender trust, then leverages this trust anchor to authenticate 90% of messages (DATA frames) using lightweight GMAC operations. The core innovation - an Ephemeral Session Tag (EST) whitelist mechanism - enables 95% of messages to achieve immediate verification without waiting for key disclosure, while Bloom filter integration provides O(1) revocation checking in 1 us. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SALT-V achieves 0.035 ms average computation time (57x faster than pure ECDSA), 1 ms end-to-end latency, 41-byte overhead, and linear scalability to 2000 vehicles, making it the first practical solution to satisfy all safety-critical requirements for real-time V2X deployment.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 19 sections, 3 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. System model
  4. Network Architecture
  5. Communication Model
  6. Our Proposed Scheme: SALT-V
  7. System Initialization
  8. Registration and Credential Provisioning
  9. Time Anchor and Revocation Distribution
  10. Broadcast Authentication Protocol
  11. Receiver Processing and Verification
  12. Security Analysis
  13. Threat Model and Assumptions
  14. Security Properties
  15. Performance Evaluation
  16. ...and 4 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: SALT-V system architecture and authentication flow
  • Figure 2: Interaction of the proposed protocol
  • Figure 3: Performance evaluation of SALT-V against baseline schemes