Flexible and anonymous network slicing selection for C-RAN enabled 5G service authentication

Abstract

The fifth generation (5G) mobile communication technologies significantly promote the development of attractive applications such as automatic driving and telemedicine due to its lower latency, higher data rate and massive connectivities. In addition, 5G network slices can be used to realize tailored transmission network according to users’ different requirements. Nevertheless, 5G still suffers from security, privacy and performance issues exemplified by authenticated key agreement, identity and network slice privacy, and the flexibility and efficiency of network slice selection. In this paper, we tackle these challenges by proposing FANS, a Flexible and Anonymous Network Slicing method for cloud radio access network enabled authentication of emerging 5G service. FANS achieves users’ identity privacy protection by hiding the public key associated with the actual identity in transmitted messages. The privacy, flexibility and efficiency of network slice selection are realized by adopting the idea of privacy-aware one-to-many matching which has been used in anonymous attribute-based encryption. Based on comprehensive security and performance analysis, FANS is shown to be secure and efficient.