A lightweight authentication scheme for 5G mobile communications: a dynamic key approach

Abstract

The security of modern IoT Industry 4.0, 5G, 6G, Mobile ad hoc (MANET), narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) and wireless sensory (WSN) networks and the autonomous computing capabilities of individual devices and self-organizing, greatly influence their applications in smart connected world. To achieve the sufficient security and privacy, autonomous and dynamic adaptive key management scheme and mutual authentication protocols should be provided to validate legitimacies of large number of nodes, users, devices, and servers in 5G networks. To this end, we propose a lightweight cipher approach that enhances the security level of communications and enables authentication and access control scheme that is implemented on a multi-layer communication architecture designed for NB-IoT 5G networks and resolve heterogeneity and scalability issues. It is well known that establishing an efficient cryptographic key generation and management scheme for machine-to-machine (M2M) and device-to-device (D2D) communication for IoT networks in 5G, the purposes of encryption and decryption is severely constrained by computation resources and performance. As a part of the network security, the key management plays a vital role in it. When compared to other schemes in PKI such as public key, pairwise-key and group-based key management, the dynamic-key based security is efficient in resource utilization and scalable which are the two key performance factors for Cloud based IoT/wireless sensory networks. Usually most IoT networks use a less secure communication channel that employs session keys in order to encrypt the communication. Additionally, in most IoT networks the resource consumption is constrained which then results in existing dynamic key generation algorithms being infeasible to run. It is still a challenging problem to securely interconnect and operate IoT protocols between constrained embedded devices. We propose a novel dynamic key generation scheme that takes the entropy and performs various operations to continuously generate a large set of unique keys. This type of key generation model is predominantly suitable for the conditions where the IoT devices cannot rely on constant key negotiation with dedicated servers as well as those devices which cannot reuse existing keys for encryption purposes. Performance evaluation using simulation and case study demonstrates that our dynamic key establishment scheme ensures an enhanced security level while reducing the communication overhead and the average latency for different category of IoT applications in 5G networks.