An Enhanced Application Authentication and Key Management in 5G

Abstract

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.