Group-Based Authentication and Key Agreement With Dynamic Policy Updating for MTC in LTE-A Networks

Abstract

Machine type communication (MTC) is an important mobile communication approach in the long-term evaluation-advanced (LTE-A) networks. To meet the MTC security requirements, the access authentication processing of MTC devices needs to follow the evolved packet system-authentication and key agreement (EPS-AKA), a protocol defined in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) standard. However, in the emergence of group-based communication scenarios, an independent authentication processing for each MTC device will cause signal congestion in the networks. In addition, the access-policy updating has always been an issue when constructing authentication schemes. In this paper, we propose a group-based AKA (GR-AKA) protocol with dynamic policy updating. Specifically, we choose an asynchronous secret share scheme combining with Diffie–Hellman key exchange scheme to implement distributed authentication and session key establishment in the LTE-A networks, and to achieve dynamic MTC-device access authority updating. Compared with other authentication protocols in the LTE-A networks, our method could not only authenticate several MTC devices simultaneously but also dynamically update the access-policy to control the access authority of MTC devices. Extensive analysis and experiment results have shown the efficiency and efficacy of proposed protocol.