A Secure and Efficient Handover Authentication Based on Digital Twin in 5G-V2X

In recent years, 5G-V2X has promoted the advancement of autonomous vehicles, enabling the latter to obtain more information via 5G networks. However, fast-moving vehicles have to perform frequent handover authentication with base stations in vulnerable wireless channels, which can cause access failures and affect smooth driving. The digital twin is the virtual agent in cyberspace to reliably provide real-time decisions and added-value services to improve the quality of communication for vehicles by analyzing raw data and interacting with the 5G core network. Based on the capabilities of digital twin, in this paper, we propose digital twin-assisted handover authentication scheme that uses the digital twin as the bridge to exchange necessary parameters in 5G-V2X, thereby intelligently assisting in completing mutual authentication and key negotiation between the vehicle and the target base station in advance and reducing the complexity of the handover process. Furthermore, the security and performance analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme is secure and efficient.