Novel 5G Authentication Protocol to Improve the Resistance Against Active Attacks and Malicious Serving Networks

Abstract

The security of mobile communication largely depends on the strength of the authentication key exchange protocol. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Group has standardized the 5G AKA (Authentication and Key Agreement) protocol for the next generation of mobile communications. It has been recently shown that the current version of this protocol still contains several weaknesses regarding user localization, leakage of activity, active attackers, and in the presence of malicious serving networks, leading to potentially major security leaks. We propose a new version of the 5G AKA protocol to overcome all the currently identified weaknesses in the protocol. In the new protocol, we replace the sequence numbers with random numbers, making it possible to drastically reduce the number of required communication phases and steps in the protocol. The usage of random numbers for the 5G AKA protocol is possible since the current Universal Subscriber Identity Modules (USIMs) are now capable of performing randomized asymmetric encryption operations. Moreover, the proposed protocol provides two additional security features, i.e., postcompromise security and forward security, not present in the current 5G AKA protocol. Finally, we evaluate the performance, both computation and communication efficiency, of the proposed AKA protocol and show its improvements compared to the current 5G AKA protocol.

The Potential Short- and Long-Term Disruptions and Transformative Impacts of 5G and Beyond Wireless Networks: Lessons Learnt From the Development of a 5G Testbed Environment

“…As a result, a new generation of security services has to be offered [58]. Novel 5G AKA, USIM and ECC based design of handoff authentication for 5G-WLAN HetNets will be needed that can extend the provisions of secure and seamless internet connectivity [59]. Many of these additional requirements come from the technology shift to SDN [55] and NF virtualization (NFV) [42], network slicing, massive MIMO [33], NOMA [60], ultra-dense small cell network [40], D2D and M2M communications, and the cloud, and they lead to the need of increased security on the network side.…”

A new scalable authentication and access control mechanism for 5G-based IoT

“…Despite the evolutions to the AKA protocol made in each generation, the nutshell of the AAC mechanism stays the same and is based on symmetric cryptography and a secret key shared between the UE and the HN [36]. In 3G and 4G, the identity of the UE (IMSI) is sent in a clear text in the identity request part of the AKA protocol, which allows privacy attacks against the UE [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. To address this problem, in 5G, the UE sends its identity protected by asymmetric encryption using the HN's public key.…”

“…The security flaws of the AKA-based AAC mechanism used in cellular networks, the different attacks against them and their formal security analysis were studied in several pieces of research [38][39][40][41][42][43]. If we focus on 5G-AKA as the main AAC mechanism in 5G, we can see that although it is not in the operational stage yet, some security flaws have already been recognized.…”

“…The attacker can capture the authentication request message which is sent from the network to the UE (or device) and replay it after. If the UE (or device) answers with the Synchronization Failure message, the attacker determines the presence of the target UE (or device) in a particular area [40][41][42][43]. In [38] the authors introduce the "Location Confidentiality Attack" which is against the user location confidentiality but as it is mentioned in [44], this attack is an extension of the "Linkability Attack".…”

“…But in this case, there is a need for a global PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) among all the operators which is not feasible [41]. The authors in [36] also introduce another attack called "Activity Monitoring Attacks" which is also caused by the transmission of the Synchronization Failure message in clear [42]. They claimed that an attacker can break the confidentiality of the token's sequence number (which is sent from the network to the UE) and monitor the activity of the target UE or device and learn its typical service consumption from the difference between the sequence numbers at two different times.…”