PSEH: A provably secure and efficient handover AKA protocol in LTE/LTE-A network

Abstract

In order to accomplish the increasing security demands of handover-based applications such as mobile multimedia services and transportation system, various handover Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocols were proposed by the researchers in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) network. However, these AKA protocols fail to preserve the privacy of communication entities and suffer from numerous attacks. In addition, these protocols incur high network overhead which doesn’t suit for the resource-constrained mobile devices in LTE/LTE-A network. Also, the protocols can’t establish the key forward/backward secrecy (KFS/KBS) and overcome the key escrow problem. To avoid the above-mentioned security issues, we propose the provably secure and efficient handover (PSEH)-AKA protocol based on double-trapdoor chameleon hash function. The PSEH-AKA protocol is proven secure under random oracle model to obtain the mutual authentication, session key secrecy, integrity and resistance from malicious attacks. The proposed handover protocol accommodates all the security demands such as KFS/KBS, privacy-preservation and establishes the secure session key between the communication entities. Furthermore, the formal verification using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool shows the correctness and informal analysis shows the security properties of the protocol. The performance evaluation of the PSEH-AKA protocol is carried out with existing handover AKA protocols in terms of storage, communication, and computation overhead. The evaluation results show that the protocol achieves substantial efficiency and secure against the identified attacks.