HGKA: Hierarchical Dynamic Group Key Agreement Protocol for Machine Type Communication in LTE Networks

Abstract

Machine Type Communication (MTC) is one among the fastest emerging technologies of mobile communication due to the massive increase in number of Network of things devices. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has considered MTC as a part of Long Term Evolution (LTE) infrastructure in order to support various MTC applications. In order to communicate with the MTC server, an MTC device (MTCD) must authenticate to the network. The LTE network nodes suffers from signaling congestion when multiple MTCDs tries to authenticate to the network simultaneously. To overcome signaling congestion, several protocols have been proposed but the existing protocols use the concept of sharing of group key for authentication. We propose HGKA protocol to enhances the security compared to the existing schemes by avoiding the sharing or pre-storing of the group key to achieve group authentication. The proposed protocol employs authenticated group key agreement which can be used for group authentication and also provides forward secrecy and backward secrecy when an MTCD member gets added or leaves from the group by updating the group key.