The 5G-AKA Authentication Protocol Privacy

Koutsos, Adrien

doi:10.1109/eurosp.2019.00041

Cited by 72 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The study also shows that the 5G protocol lacks other critical security properties. The studies presented in [19] and [20] reach similar conclusions. Moreover, the authors of [21] describe potential downgrade attacks against 5G networks.…”

Section: B Other Security Challengessupporting

confidence: 73%

Security and Protocol Exploit Analysis of the 5G Specifications

Jover

Marojevic

2019

IEEE Access

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The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) released its first 5G security specifications in March 2018. This paper reviews the proposed security architecture, its main requirements and procedures, and evaluates them in the context of known and new protocol exploits. Although security has been improved from previous generations, our analysis identifies unrealistic 5G system assumptions and protocol edge cases that can render 5G communication systems vulnerable to adversarial attacks. For example, null encryption and null authentication are still supported and can be used in valid system configurations. With no clear proposal to tackle pre-authentication messages, mobile devices continue to implicitly trust any serving network, which may or may not enforce a number of optional security features, or which may not be legitimate. Moreover, several critical security and key management functions are left outside of the scope of the specifications. The comparison with known 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) protocol exploits reveals that the 5G security specifications, as of Release 15, Version 1.0.0, do not fully address the user privacy and network availability challenges.

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Section: B Other Security Challengessupporting

confidence: 73%

Security and Protocol Exploit Analysis of the 5G Specifications

Jover

Marojevic

2019

IEEE Access

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“…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.…”

Section: Aka-based Aac Flawsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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.…”

Section: Aka-based Aac Flawsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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".…”

Section: Aka-based Aac Flawsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Behrad

Bertin

Tuffin

et al. 2020

Future Generation Computer Systems

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The fifth generation of mobile networks, 5G, is expected to support a set of many requirements and use cases such as handling connectivity for a massive number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Authenticating IoT devices and controlling their access to the network plays a vital role in the security of these devices and of the whole cellular system. In current cellular networks, as well as in 3GPP specifications release 16 on 5G, the AAC (Authentication and Access Control) of IoT devices is done in the same manner as the AAC of MBB (Mobile Broadband) UE (User Equipment). Considering the expected growth of IoT devices, this will likely induce a very high load on the connectivity provider's CN (Core Network) and cause network failures.To manage the AAC of this massive number of devices, we propose an SSAAC (Slice Specific Authentication and Access Control) mechanism that makes use of the flexibility provided by virtualization technologies. This mechanism allows the authentication and access control of IoT devices to be delegated to the 3rd parties providing these devices, thereby decreasing the load of the connectivity provider's CN, while increasing the flexibility and modularity of the whole 5G network. We evaluate the feasibility of our proposal with the OAI (Open Air Interface) open-source platform. Next, we provide a security analysis of the proposal and highlight the security requirements to use with this proposal. We also evaluate the impact of this delegation approach on the network load considering the anticipated number of AAC signaling messages compared to the existing AAC mechanisms in cellular networks. According to these evaluations, our approach is feasible and it would provide cellular networks the opportunity to overcome the security shortcomings in their AAC mechanisms. It also considerably reduces the AAC signaling load on the connectivity provider's CN. IntroductionAlong with mobility, security is one of the most important aspects of cellular systems. AAC (Authentication and access control) plays a vital role in ensuring the expected security level. In 3G and 4G, authentication and access control of subscribers are done through AKA (authentication and key agreement) protocols. These protocols (UMTS-AKA protocol in 3G and EPS-AKA in 4G) are based on the unique identities of subscribers and symmetric cryptographic algorithms [1,2] The system subscribers' identities and the secret keys (that are used in symmetric cryptographic algorithms) are provisioned in secured elements (e.g., SIM cards or embedded SIM) and stored in cellular system's database as well. Executing these AKA protocols to establish a secure connection with the cellular system is mandatory for each UE (composed of a mobile device and a secured element) to obtain its cellular connectivity [1,2]. However, these well-established principles may prevent cellular systems from supporting the connectivity of a massive number of devices [3], in particular when considering the context of the IoT-where a high growth rate of connected devices...

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“…All these reasons explain why there are currently only few formal proofs of unlinkability. For instance, we may note the manual but very detailed proof of unlinkability for a variant of AKA by Koutsos [24] and the mechanised proofs of e-passport and RFID protocols by Hirschi et al [21] using ProVerif. Both of these works have lead to the discovery of new attacks on protocols that were previously claimed unlinkable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Method for Proving Unlinkability of Stateful Protocols

Baelde

Delaune

Moreau

2020

2020 IEEE 33rd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)

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The rise of contactless and wireless devices such as mobile phones and RFID chips justifies significant concerns over privacy, and calls for communication protocols that ensure some form of unlinkability. Formally specifying this property is difficult and context-dependent, and analysing it is very complex; as is common with security protocols, several incorrect unlinkability claims can be found in the literature. Formal verification is therefore desirable, but current techniques are not sufficient to directly analyse unlinkability. In [21], two conditions have been identified that imply unlinkability and can be automatically verified. That work, however, only considers a restricted class of protocols. We adapt their formal definition as well as their proof method to the common setting of RFID authentication protocols, where readers access a central database of authorised users. Moreover, we also consider protocols where readers may update their database, and tags may also carry a mutable state. We propose sufficient conditions to ensure unlinkability, find new attacks, and obtain new proofs of unlinkability using Tamarin to establish our sufficient conditions.

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The 5G-AKA Authentication Protocol Privacy

Cited by 72 publications

References 22 publications

Security and Protocol Exploit Analysis of the 5G Specifications

Security and Protocol Exploit Analysis of the 5G Specifications

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

A Method for Proving Unlinkability of Stateful Protocols

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