Dynamic Group Based Efficient Access Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for MTC in LTE-A Networks

Abstract

The machine-type communication (MTC) connects millions of the smart devices and provides a large number of applications through all of our lives. Every day, MTC is undergoing ubiquitous development and becoming a crucial application of the Internet of Things. To implement MTC in real-life, it is a big challenge to ensure the congestion control and security and privacy of the MTC devices (MTCDs) within the MTC network. When umpteen MTCDs concurrently try to access the network, each MTCD requires performing a distinct 3GPP specified access authentication procedure with the core network, that creates distressful signaling congestion over the MTC network. Taking into the consideration the aforementioned issues, in this research article, the authors suggest a dynamic group based access authentication and key agreement protocol for MTC called as EMTC-AKA protocol. The proposed protocol ensures strong mutual authentication between the MTC entities and identity protection of the MTCDs. Unlike, the other approaches, projected approach ensures confidentiality and integrity of the user/control plane data transmitted over the wireless interface and optimizes the need of group key update on each group membership update. We formally verified the suggested protocol on Automated Validation of the Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. The verification results and theoretical analysis of the protocol signify that the suggested approach is safe from the multiple malicious attacks and ensures less bandwidth consumption, signaling overhead, transmission cost and transmission delay over the MTC network.