Abstract

Machine Type Communication (MTC) has been emerging for a wide range of applications and services for the Internet of Things (IoT). In some scenarios, a large group of MTC devices (MTCDs) may enter the communication coverage of a new target base station simultaneously. However, the current handover mechanism specified by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) incur high signalling overhead over the access network and the core network for such scenario. Moreover, other existing solutions have several security problems in terms of failure of key forward secrecy (KFS) and lack of mutual authentication. In this paper, we propose an efficient authentication protocol for a group of MTCDs in all handover scenarios. By the proposal, the messages of two MTCDs are concatenated and sent by an authenticated group member to reduce the signalling cost. The proposed protocol has been analysed on its security functionality to show its ability to preserve user privacy and resist from major typical malicious attacks. It can be expected that the proposed scheme is applicable to all kinds of group mobility scenarios such as a platoon of vehicles or a high-speed train. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of computational and signalling cost.

Highlights

  • Machine-type communication (MTC), regarded as machine to machine (M2M) communication, is evolving to be an essential component of 5th Generation (5G) wireless networks

  • It is referred as a group handover, which can be frequently observed in high-speed trains, platoon of vehicles or buses

  • It is disclosed in [2] that there are some weaknesses in the Xn handover authentication process including failure of key forward secrecy (KFS), vulnerability to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and lack of mutual authentication between a MTC devices (MTCDs) and its target gNodeB (t-gNB)

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Machine-type communication (MTC), regarded as machine to machine (M2M) communication, is evolving to be an essential component of 5G wireless networks. According to the 3GPP standard, a handover has been categorized into a Xn based intra-Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF) handover, a N2 based intraAMF handover and a N2 based inter-AMF handover It is disclosed in [2] that there are some weaknesses in the Xn handover authentication process including failure of key forward secrecy (KFS), vulnerability to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and lack of mutual authentication between a MTCD and its target gNodeB (t-gNB). The solution in [5] has a lower computation overhead, while it cannot support a dynamic change of group members It has some security problems such as lack of authentication for the control mobile relay nodes, failed KFS/Key backward secrecy (KBS) and failure to preserve the privacy of the UEs. The solution in [6] has proposed a universal protocol for N2 and Xn handovers.

System model
Attack model
Motivation of the proposal
Details of the proposed solution
Initial authentication
Group handover preparation
Group handover authentication
Security analysis
Performance evaluation
Signaling cost
Computational cost
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call