Provably Secure Protocol for 5G HetNets

The fifth generation (5G) networks exhibit high data rates and capacities that endear them to applications such as internet of things (IoT) and mobile banking. Due to sensitivity of data exchanged in these applications, security and privacy preservation schemes are essential for their deployments. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has specified evolved packet system authentication and key agreement (EPSAKA) and 5G AKA protocols for mutually authenticating the communicating entities. However, these protocols are vulnerable to attacks such as impersonation, denial of service (DoS), hijacking and packet replays. Consequently, other schemes based on technologies such as blockchain, public key cryptography and certificates have been introduced to counter these threats. Unfortunately, these algorithms have either high computation and communication overheads or fail to effectively prevent these attacks. In this paper, a new key agreement and authentication protocol is presented. Security evaluation shows that this protocol upholds backward and forward key secrecy, and is robust against attacks such as privileged insider and privacy violations. In terms of performance, it exhibits average computation overheads compared with other related schemes.