An efficient anonymous group handover authentication protocol for MTC devices for 5G networks

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.