Generic Bootstrapping Architecture Research Articles

An Enhanced Application Authentication and Key Management in 5G

AKMA (Application Authentication and Key Management) is a technology that 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) provides security capabilities to 5G (5th generation wireless systems) as a third party. At present, 3GPP has finalized the publication of AKMA specifications in Release 16 and is developing AKMA phase 2 in Release 18. At the current stage, it is recommended to conduct enhanced research on AKMA to solve some security problems of AKMA. This paper first briefly describes and analyzes the principles and technological development process of two mainstream application authentication technologies GBA (Generic Bootstrapping Architecture) and AKMA, and analyzes the advantages and limitations of these two technologies. Secondly, we also analyze the signaling loss caused by the AKMA process conducted independently by different application servers in the same trust domain, and the security risk caused by the long-term use of the same application key by AKMA users. Finally, this paper proposes solutions to AKMA performance and security problems from the perspective of security, universality, and performance impact.

5G Authentication and Key Management for Applications

3GPP has finalized the publication of 5G specifications in Release 16, also called 5G phase 2 in 3GPP, which focuses on the enhancements of 5G basis to address more use cases in the 5G ecosystem. In Release 16, 3GPP took into account a variety of vertical markets in 5G, where security requirements and corresponding mechanisms are increasingly in focus. One of the important security features introduced in 3GPP Release 16 is the Authentication and Key Management for Applications (AKMA), which is similar to the Generic Bootstrapping Architecture (GBA) specified in earlier generations, leveraging an operator authentication infrastructure in order to secure the communication between the UE and an Application Function (AF). To help understand the origin and principles of AKMA better, this article first introduces mechanisms specified before 5G, including GBA and Battery Efficient Security for very low Throughput Machine (BEST), then presents the AKMA specification in more detail, and finally summarizes the enhancements of AKMA compared to preceding mechanisms.

Universally Composable Key Bootstrapping and Secure Communication Protocols for the Energy Internet

The Energy Internet is an advanced smart grid solution to increase energy efficiency by jointly operating multiple energy resources via the Internet. However, such an increasing integration of energy resources requires secure and efficient communication in the Energy Internet. To address such a requirement, we propose a new secure key bootstrapping protocol to support the integration and operation of energy resources. By using a universal composability model that provides a strong security notion for designing and analyzing cryptographic protocols, we define an ideal functionality that supports several cryptographic primitives used in this paper. Furthermore, we provide an ideal functionality for key bootstrapping and secure communication, which allows exchanged session keys to be used for secure communication in an ideal manner. We propose the first secure key bootstrapping protocol that enables a user to verify the identities of other users before key bootstrapping. We also present a secure communication protocol for unicast and multicast communications. The ideal functionalities help in the design and analysis of the proposed protocols. We perform some experiments to validate the performance of our protocols, and the results show that our protocols are superior to the existing related protocols and are suitable for the Energy Internet. As a proof of concept, we apply our functionalities to a practical key bootstrapping protocol, namely generic bootstrapping architecture.

Performance evaluation of an authentication solution for IMS services access

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an access-independent, IP based, service control architecture. Users' authentication to the IMS takes place through the AKA (Authentication and Key Agreement) protocol, while Generic Bootstrapping Architecture (GBA) is used to authenticate users before accessing the multimedia services over HTTP. In this paper, we focus on the performance analysis of an IMS Service Authentication solution that we proposed and that employs the Identity Based Cryptography (IBC) to personalize each user access. We carry out the implementation of this solution on top of an emulated IMS architecture and evaluate its performance through different clients' access scenarios. Performance results indicate that increase in the number of clients does not influence the average processing time and the average consumed resources of the GBA entities during the authentication. We also notice that the Bootstrapping Server Function (BSF) presents a bottleneck during the service authentication which helps in giving some guidelines for the GBA entities deployment.

INTEGRATING IDENTITY-BASED CRYPTOGRAPHY IN IMS SERVICE AUTHENTICATION

Nowadays, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a promising research field. Many ongoing works related to the security and the performances of its employment are presented to the research community. Although, the security and data privacy aspects are very important in the IMS global objectives, they observe little attention so far. Secure access to multimedia services is based on SIP and HTTP digest on top of IMS architecture. The standard deploys AKA-MD5 for the terminal authentication. The third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) provided Generic Bootstrapping Architecture (GBA) to authenticate the subscriber before accessing multimedia services over HTTP. In this paper, we propose a new IMS Service Authentication scheme using Identity Based cryptography (IBC). This new scheme will lead to better performances when there are simultaneous authentication requests using Identity-based Batch Verification. We analyzed the security of our new protocol and we presented a performance evaluation of its cryptographic operations.

Authentication & key agreement for off-portal mobile applications

This paper identifies serious user privacy concerns with the 3GPP Generic Bootstrapping Architecture protocol when used as the basis for security for certain Off-portal applications such those encountered in e-health environments. A possible alternative approach avoiding these concerns is also outlined.