Implementation of 5G Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol on Xbee Networks

Abstract

While 5G systems are being deployed across the globe in a phased manner, trust models for communication between the User Equipment (UE) and the core network play a vital role in fulfilling the network goals promised by 5G. Towards that end, the 5G - Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) protocol has been standardised by the 3GPP consortium after multiple iterations and corrective responses. Despite this progress, there is a requirement to collate information from multiple ETSI technical specifications and several research contributions to implement a standardised security architectural model for 5G networks. Identifying the absence of single point repository containing 5G security protocols, this demonstration provides first hand collation and description of state-of-the-art details in simple and unified manner. In this demonstration, we implement the 3GPP compliant 5G-AKA protocol on a network of XBee S2C devices wherein the protocol involves a sequence of modules involving secure authentication, key exchange and payload transmission. To implement the security protocol, we extract the precise recommendations of 3GPP and also use open source algorithms wherever the implementation is left open as proprietary solution. Other than implementing standard modules from 3GPP specifications, we also showcase novel key exchange and provenance-recovery mechanisms that potentially fit the 5G standards in the framework of device-to-device (D2D) communication.