Group access authentication of machine to machine communications in LTE networks

Abstract

Today Machine to Machine (M2M) communications are very expanded in many application areas. M2M devices are likely to be small and able to operate for long periods and transmit data through wireless links, it is also defined as machine type communication (MTC) in Release 10 of the 3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership Project. Recently, most research has focused on congestion control, sensing information and control technologies and resource management, etc, but there are not many studies on the security aspects. Indeed, M2M communications and equipments may be exposed to different types of attacks (physical attacks on equipment and recovery of sensitive data, configurations attacks to compromise the software, attacks on the communications protocol, etc). In this article we introduce security into the M2M architecture and discuss the most important question of security, which is the group access authentication by modifying existing authentication protocols, such as group authentication and key agreement protocol used to resolve the group access authentication for M2M.