Handover Authentication Research Articles

Blockchain-based fast handover authentication protocol for Internet of Vehicles in small industrial parks

Autonomous vehicles safeguard the security and efficiency of Internet of Vehicles systems in small industrial parks by authenticating and exchanging real-time information with transportation infrastructure. Deploying a multi-server framework reduces the risk of message blocking and privacy information leakage from centralized services. However, in traditional handover authentication protocols, there are still potential security risks such as high-overhead performance issues and single point of failure attacks. Therefore, it is considered challenging to realize efficient authentication while protecting the privacy of vehicles. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient handover authentication protocol for autonomous vehicles in a small industrial park to address the challenges. The protocol is based on blockchain and Pedersen verifiable secret sharing scheme, which not only ensures lightweight real-time interactions between autonomous vehicles and edge servers in multi-server environments, but also strictly protects the security and privacy of both vehicles and edge servers. We prove the semantic security of the protocol under the Real-Or-Random model and perform a informal analysis of its security attributes to show that it can withstand a wide range of malicious attacks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol satisfies more security requirements and has better computational efficiency and communication cost than other related protocols.

Seamless group handover authentication protocol for vehicle networks: Services continuity

The advantages of low latency, high reliability and high bandwidth of dense cellular network support real-time sensing, decision making and regulation of vehicular network. Network densification demands smaller coverage areas for base stations that are strategically deployed near consumers to support multiple services. This results in more frequently triggered handover processes. To reduce the latency induced by the handover process and ensure service continuity, this paper proposes a seamless vehicle group handover authentication protocol named SVGHP. The proposed protocol utilizes lightweight algorithms such as quadratic residual and symmetric encryption, and generates and distributes keys for group members based on the Chinese Residual Theorem to achieve handover authentication. Secondly, SVGHP includes a re-authentication phase, specifically, the vehicle group and the subsequent base stations receive the updated keys distributed by the previous RSUs for simplified authentication. And the involvement of the cloud server is avoided, eliminating the network communication delay to the core network. Detailed performance evaluation and comparison with existing protocols demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of computational cost and communication overhead. And in general, our scheme reduces the handover delay by at least 67.91% over the previous authentication schemes. We also provide formal and informal security proofs to prove that our protocol meets common security requirements.

Enhancing privacy and security in 5G networks with an anonymous handover protocol based on Blockchain and Zero Knowledge Proof

The latest advancement in cellular technology, 5G, has the ability to facilitate various applications such as Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, vehicular communications, and the Internet of Everything (IoE). However, the technology is faced with challenges related to user privacy, resource management, handover authentication, and security of the air interface and internet channels. Moreover, the use of specialized base stations such as wireless Access Points (AP) and Road-Side Units (RSU) in vehicular communications may be owned by subscribers outside formal network operators. The conventional handover authentication schemes have a lengthy latency period that conflicts with the 5G quality of service. To tackle these challenges, this paper presents an anonymous scheme that utilizes Blockchain and Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) to ensure efficient privacy in the handover protocol of 5G Networks. The proposed scheme has been thoroughly evaluated for security and privacy and has shown to be resistant to identity catching, location area tracing, and replay attacks while achieving Forward/Backward secrecy. Furthermore, the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme indicates that it is efficient and speedy as it involves a limited number of messages, low computation, and does not necessitate the involvement of the Home Network (HN) in the authentication or handover protocols. A diligently crafted BAHO authentication protocol, following cryptographic principles, guarantees robust security against the Real-or-Random model. This results in a seamless and secure transition for User Equipment, upholding confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity during handovers between Access Points.

AHA-BV: Access and handover authentication protocol with batch verification for satellite–terrestrial integrated networks

At present, the rapid development of satellite capabilities has prompted the proposal of satellite–terrestrial integrated networks (STIN), which solves the problem of limited signal coverage of terrestrial cellular networks, further promotes the globalization process, and realizes global data sharing and on-demand use. However, due to the high openness of satellite-to-ground links in STIN, users are vulnerable to attacks such as eavesdropping, replay, tampering, and impersonation when requesting access to satellite nodes and obtaining subscription services. To ensure the security and reliability, many authentication protocols have been proposed, but there are still some shortcomings, such as high authentication overhead, vulnerability to certain attacks. In addition, for inter-satellite handovers caused by the highly dynamic topology of satellites, the computational overhead of existing handover authentication mechanisms is too high to be applied to frequent inter-satellite handover scenarios in STIN. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a new access and handover authentication protocol with batch verification for STIN, namely the AHA-BV protocol. The AHA-BV protocol not only realizes mutual authentication and key negotiation between users and satellite access points without the participation of the network control center, but also ensures the conditional anonymity of users during the access authentication phase. Furthermore, the lightweight batch verification mechanism reduces the risk of computing bottlenecks when resource-constrained satellites receive a large number of access authentication requests. Not only that, the AHA-BV protocol can also achieve sustained trust in subscription services from STIN with low computational overhead during the inter-satellite handover authentication phase. Formal and heuristic security analysis show that the AHA-BV protocol can meet the security requirements of STIN. Performance analysis indicates that the AHA-BV protocol has low authentication overhead while ensuring security, and is more suitable for users under satellite dynamic topology to access and obtain subscription services from STIN.

A Blockchain-Assisted Security Protocol for Group Handover of MTC Devices in 5G Wireless Networks.

In the realm of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless cellular networks, renowned for their dense connectivity, there lies a substantial facilitation of a myriad of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which can be supported by the massive machine-type communication (MTC) technique, a fundamental communication framework. In some scenarios, a large number of machine-type communication devices (MTCD) may simultaneously enter the communication coverage of a target base station. However, the current handover mechanism specified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 16 incurs high signaling overhead within the access and core networks, which may have negative impacts on network efficiency. Additionally, other existing solutions are vulnerable to malicious attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and the failure of Key Forward Secrecy (KFS). To address this challenge, this paper proposes an efficient and secure handover authentication protocol for a group of MTCDs supported by blockchain technology. This protocol leverages the decentralized nature of blockchain technology and combines it with certificateless aggregate signatures to mutually authenticate the identity of a base station and a group of MTCDs. This approach can reduce signaling overhead and avoid key escrow while significantly lowering the risk associated with single points of failure. Additionally, the protocol protects device anonymity by encrypting device identities with temporary anonymous identity markers with the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) to abandon serial numbers to prevent linkage attacks. The resilience of the proposed protocol against predominant malicious attacks has been rigorously validated through the application of the BAN logic and Scyther tool, underscoring its robust security attributes. Furthermore, compared to the existing solutions, the proposed protocol significantly reduces the authentication cost for a group of MTCDs during handover, while ensuring security, demonstrating commendable efficiency.

Security Intelligence Enhanced by Blockchain Data Transitions and Effective Handover Authentication

The most significant method is intrusion detection, which improves privacy concerns about client authentication and authorization. No matter what is done to enhance security intelligence, vulnerability has also increased in the modern era. The major role is to predict those vulnerabilities and improve security enhancements by using blockchain methods to enhance privacy concerns. In the corporation, banking, or healthcare system, the major issues are data spoofing, cyber security issues, and viruses affecting confidential data or breaking the shield of data protection. Enhance authorization and authentication by connecting the fog cloud and using the blockchain to protect privacy. In the transition of data, attackers may increase their attacks using various forms. Even if the data is transformed, attackers can easily access it and break the confidentiality of the entire massive database. FCBS (Fog Cloud Blockchain Server) will prevent data vulnerability by using FCS (Fog Cloud Server) modalities for data access. It consists of two segments, AuC (Authentication) and AuT (authorization) during the processing of data. BC (blockchain) addresses the data functionality and enhances the FCS security intelligence in two parts. By preventing the vulnerability earlier, no FC (Fog Cloud) data will be affected. To ensure data protection is reliable and accurate by handing over the AuC and AuT.

Highly secured authentication and fast handover scheme for mobility management in 5G vehicular networks

The Fifth Generation (5 G) networks exhibit high flexibility and diversity in their design and deployment strategies. Transitions between base stations (BSs), heterogeneous networks (HetNets) and other cellular networks provide significant vulnerabilities and expose users to substantial risks associated with cybersecurity attacks. This article evaluates current handover authentication methods in the context of 5 G networks while proposing a set of security criteria for handover authentication. This study presents a novel authentication technique called SHK (Secure Handover Key) that utilizes SDNs (Software Defined networks). The proposed scheme integrates recycled lightweight dynamic key cryptography and combines security features such as perfect forward secrecy and robustness to leakages. The significance of the proposed approach is assessed in terms of computations, communications, signals, and energy costs on 5 G mobility applications and Vehicular Communication Networks (VCNs). The scheme employed in this study demonstrates enhanced security measures and improved changeover performance compared to conventional schemes.

HAFC: Handover Authentication Scheme Based on Fog Computing for 5G-Assisted Vehicular Blockchain Networks

HAFC: Handover Authentication Scheme Based on Fog Computing for 5G-Assisted Vehicular Blockchain Networks

An efficient key agreement and anonymous privacy preserving scheme for vehicular ad‐hoc networks with handover authentication

SummaryVehicular ad‐hoc networks (VANETs) have gained significant attention in recent years due to their potential to improve the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. VANETs are a type of wireless ad‐hoc network that enables communication between vehicles and between vehicles and roadside infrastructure. VANETs can also improve the efficiency of transportation systems by reducing traffic congestion and improving traffic flow. In addition to improving safety and efficiency, VANETs also face several challenges. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring the security and privacy of the data transmitted over the network. In this manuscript, an anonymous authentication scheme for VANET users is proposed along with privacy preservation and confidentiality. An efficient session key agreement protocol is designed for transferring location‐based information between the vehicle user and the roadside unit (RSU). Further, updated session keys are transferred to the subsequent RSU, when the vehicle user moves to another location. Moreover, re‐authentication of VANET users is completely evaded during to handover authentication, thus reducing the computational overhead. In addition, Resistance to different security assaults is discussed in this work through informal analysis. Finally, performance is compared with different relevant schemes and validated through Cygwin software.

Provable Secure and Lightweight Blockchain-Based V2I Handover Authentication and V2V Broadcast Protocol for VANETs

Provable Secure and Lightweight Blockchain-Based V2I Handover Authentication and V2V Broadcast Protocol for VANETs

A Novel Access and Handover Authentication Scheme in UAV-Aided Satellite-Terrestrial Integration Networks Enabling 5G

As an outlook of the terrestrial network, the flexible Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-aided satellite-terrestrial integration network would have numerous prospective applications such as service enhancement, maritime communication, military, and emergency communication, which is getting significant attention. However, the public and open-access network must result in various imperative risks including impersonation, sensitive data, and privacy disclosure. Due to several unique characteristics including long transmission distance, unstable communication environment, resource-limited and highly dynamic characteristics of UAVs, diversified terminals that lack the ability of accessing the satellite and may be resource-limited, there are new challenges for the access authentication process in the UAV-Aided Satellite-Terrestrial Integration Networks with 5G. In this paper, we present a novel Physically Unclonable Function (PUF)-based access authentication scheme consisting of two access authentication protocols for the UAV and the ground terminals like 5G User Equipments (UEs), respectively. Two access authentication protocols for the drone and the terminals can both achieve mutual authentication, key agreement, and privacy protection with distinct advantages of no need to store secret key and supporting physical attack resistance. Finally, we propose an efficient handover authentication protocol executed by the ground terminals when the UAV is required to switch. We employ different security analysis tools to analyze the security of all proposed protocols, as well as present informal security analysis on various security properties. The performance comparison and evaluations show our protocols have better advantages.

MRSA: Mask Random Array Protocol for Efficient Secure Handover Authentication in 5G HetNets

The emergence of new communication applications adds high heterogeneity to 5 G networks. With the increase of heterogeneity, handover of user equipment between different service HetNets is frequent. It must smoothly realize user-free switching to provide services continuously. Although the 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has proposed a standard protocol for this scenario, it is found that these protocols cannot satisfy key forward/backward secrecy, lacks mutual authentication, etc. Further, it can be subjected to replay, DoS and other attacks. To alleviate these problems, we propose a mask random array protocol, MRSA. For efficient, secure handover authentication in 5 G HetNets, we first design a verification mechanism called mask array, which depends on a random number self-circulating encryption structure. The mechanism can not only check the identity of the communication entity but also evaluate the freshness of the message. Second, we devise the mask array-based key derivation method to ensure the whole mechanism's key security. Third, formal proof and automated analysis are established to verify the efficiency and safety of the proposed MRSA protocol. Finally, function and robustness analysis illustrate the ability to resist attacks, while the simulation base station communication analysis shows the efficiency of the protocol from three aspects of data, time and energy. MRSA has significant performance advantages compared to existing schemes in 5 G HetNets.

FHAP: Fast Handover Authentication Protocol for High-Speed Mobile Terminals in 5G Satellite–Terrestrial-Integrated Networks

The integration of satellite and terrestrial networks presents new opportunities and challenges for High Speed Rail (HSR) communications. Since the HSR runs vary fast, user terminals on the HSR have to perform handover authentication when the HSR passes through different terrestrial base stations or satellite coverage areas. To improve the security and robustness of HSR communication services, a Fast Handover Authentication Protocol (FHAP) for high-speed mobile terminals in the 5G Satellite-Terrestrial integrated Networks (STN) is proposed. In the FHAP, user terminals in the same carriage form a temporary group managed by a relay node. The pre-handover authentication mechanism is employed, in which the terrestrial 5G core network configures the pre-authentication information to multiple access nodes based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem according to the location information of the HSR. Thus, group members and one of the access nodes can achieve fast handover authentication with the pre-configured information. Considering that HSR has a high running speed, when handover authentication fails, user terminals can perform handover authentication with other access nodes, and the probability of handover authentication failure caused by a single access node can be effectively reduced. We use the protocol verification tool Scyther and the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic to prove the security of the FHAP and compare it with other similar protocols in terms of signaling, bandwidth, and computational overhead. The analysis results show that the FHAP satisfies better security properties and has excellent performance.

HOOPOE: High Performance and Efficient Anonymous Handover Authentication Protocol for Flying Out of Zone UAVs

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in military and civilian systems access sensitive data via cellular networks and are ubiquitous. Therefore, the number of handovers may increase, and the process of sharing authentication keys between drones to new drones may be vulnerable to eavesdropping due to the wireless connectivity. For example, a UAV initially served by cell A may be handed over to cell B after a certain point. Therefore, Security and privacy concerns raise if there is a change in the flight path of the UAV due to wide-area connectivity traffic management, including authentication threats as well as the leakage of identity, location, and flying routes. Also, drones are resource-constrained devices that cannot perform extensive operations, leading to the inability to resist drone capture attacks and impersonation attacks. Therefore, this paper presents a high-performance and efficient anonymous handover authentication protocol to secure the drone traveling path. The protocol utilizes the advantages of the AES-RSA algorithm to provide efficient and secure key management and a fast verification and signature generation that speeds up drone authentication. The protocol's security was proved using the formal verification ROR model and automated security verifier ProVerif tool to validate the protocol resistance against various attacks and provided forward secrecy. In addition, the performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated using the OMNeT++ simulator in terms of communication, computation cost, energy consumption, packet drop ratio, end-to-end delay, and throughput. The results showed that the protocol achieves better security, efficiency, and performance than other protocols.

Security Concepts in Emerging 6G Communication: Threats, Countermeasures, Authentication Techniques and Research Directions

Challenges faced in network security have significantly steered the deployment timeline of Fifth Generation (5G) communication at a global level; therefore, research in Sixth Generation (6G) security analysis is profoundly necessitated. The prerogative of this paper is to present a survey on the emerging 6G cellular communication paradigm to highlight symmetry with legacy security concepts along with asymmetric innovative aspects such Artificial Intelligence (AI), Quantum Computing, Federated Learning, etc. We present a taxonomy of the threat model in 6G communication in five security legacy concepts, including Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Authentication and Access control (CIA3). We also suggest categorization of threat-countering techniques specific to 6G communication into three types: cryptographic methods, entity attributes and Intrusion Detection System (IDS). Thus, with this premise, we distributed the authentication techniques in eight types, including handover authentication, mutual authentication, physical layer authentication, deniable authentication, token-based authentication, certificate-based authentication, key agreement-based authentication and multi-factor authentication. We specifically suggested a series of future research directions at the conclusive edge of this survey.

A novel and quantum-resistant handover authentication protocol in IoT environment

A novel and quantum-resistant handover authentication protocol in IoT environment

XAuth: Secure and Privacy-Preserving Cross-Domain Handover Authentication for 5G HetNets

5G networks are highly heterogeneous, with ultradense base stations (BSs), due to the low penetration of millimeter waves and the availability of different access technologies. However, the continuous heterogeneity and densification of 5G networks pose great challenges to network security, especially for user mobility support. In the process of user handover between BSs or between different network domains, user access authentication and security session establishment are far riskier compared to 4G networks. On one hand, the overhead of handover authentication increases significantly as handovers become more frequent in an ultradense network. On the other hand, the differentiation of security schemes in heterogeneous networks poses a big challenge to handover authentication. Successfully designing a secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient handover authentication protocol for heterogeneous and ultra-dense 5G networks would substantially expand the prospects of future 5G network applications. Although numerous solutions (e.g., challengeresponse-based, public key cryptography-based, physical layer information-based, and blockchain-based solutions) have been proposed to solve the cross-domain handover authentication problem, most of them surfer from security and privacy vulnerabilities and unreasonable performance overhead. In this paper, we propose XAuth, a secure and privacy-preserving authentication protocol for both intra-domain and inter-domain handover in 5G Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) based on blockchain. The proposed protocol can achieve mutual authentication, key agreement between User Equipment (UE) and target network, and is characterized by forward secrecy, backward secrecy, user anonymity, and conditional privacy preservation. Formal security analysis and comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrate the security and effectiveness of the proposed protocol.

A Secure and Efficient Authentication Protocol for Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

The satellite-terrestrial networks (STNs) network has the characteristics of open links, node movement, dynamic network topology, and diverse collaborative algorithms, which will lead to frequent passive handovers and continuous re-authentication of user equipment. This causes a waste of valuable computing and storage resources in the STNs network, and seriously affects the user’s network experience. To address this, we propose an access authentication protocol with user anonymity and traceability to reduce the communication delay and signaling cost of access authentication. In addition, we also propose a hierarchical group key distribution scheme to implement cross-domain handover authentication between different groups of user equipment, thereby effectively avoiding re-authentication. We take strict security analysis to prove that the authentication protocol we propose is secure. Compared with the three related existing arts, our protocol can greatly reducing the communication interaction delay and improve the efficiency of initial access and handover authentication of user equipment.

BEPHAP: A Blockchain-based Efficient Privacy-Preserving Handover Authentication Protocol with key agreement for Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) can significantly improve transportation efficiency and ensure traffic safety. Authentication is regarded as the fundamental defense line against attacks in IoV. However, the state-of-the-art approaches suffer from several drawbacks, including bottlenecks of the single cloud server model, high computational overhead of operations, excessive trust in cloud servers and roadside units (RSUs), and leakage of vehicle trajectory privacy. This paper introduces BEPHAP, a Blockchain-based Efficient Privacy-preserving Handover Authentication Protocol with key agreement for internet of vehicles, to address these problems. BEPHAP achieves anonymous cross-domain mutual handover authentication with key agreement based on the tamper-proof blockchain, symmetric cryptography, and the chameleon hash function under a security model that cloud servers and RSUs may launch attacks. BEPHAP is particularly well suited for IoV since it allows vehicles to only perform lightweight cryptographic operations during authentication. BEPHAP also achieves data confidentiality, unlinkability, traceability, non-repudiation, non-frameability, and key escrow freeness. Formal verification based on ProVerif and formal security proofs based on the BAN logic indicates that BEPHAP is resistant to various typical attacks, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation attacks, and replay attacks. Performance analysis demonstrates that BEPHAP surpasses existing works in both computation and communication efficiencies. It is worth noting that BEPHAP reduces the computational cost of vehicles by 2 to 4 orders of magnitude compared to current schemes. And the message loss rate remains 0 at 5000 requests per second, which meets the requirement of IoV.

Efficient Group Handover Authentication for Secure 5G-Based Communications in Platoons

In recent years, the world of vehicular communication is in full progress. With the emergence of the fifth-generation (5G) technology, the high bandwidth and low latency features in the 5G vehicle to everything (5G-V2X) network become possible. However, the current 5G mechanism specified by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 16 incurs high signaling overhead over the radio access network and the core network when a vehicle platoon moves from a source base station to the target base station. Moreover, it also has several security problems in terms of the failure of key forward secrecy (KFS) and lack of mutual authentication. In this paper, we propose an efficient authentication protocol for vehicle platoons in all handover scenarios. By the proposal, the identities of base stations and vehicles are mutually authenticated by certificateless aggregated signatures, which can also reduce signaling overhead and is free from key escrow problems. The proposed protocol has been formally evaluated by BAN-logic and the Scyther tool to show its ability to resist major typical malicious attacks. It has also been analyzed on its security functionality. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of signaling, computational and communication cost.