An Efficient Authentication Protocol for 5G Heterogeneous Networks

Network security is an important service in the evolution of mobile communication technologies. The user authentication and key agreement process in 2G, 3G and 4G generations have tried to cover all security requirements. However, the deployed Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol suffers from several security and performance weaknesses, such as, user identity disclosing, high authentication delay and bandwidth consumption. All these, impact negatively the handover process and the quality of service. The new 5G network technology will utilize a basic 5G access authentication similar to the current 4G/ LTE platform. This new technology creates novel security challenges that the next generation of AKA must support. In addition, the authentication protocol must address the newly discovered security weaknesses that have been exposed in the present networks. In this paper we propose an enhancement of existed AKA protocol to improve authentication and authorization in 5G networks by using new key framework based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC). Our key framework will improve the performance and will achieve fast re-authentication during the handover. The security properties of the proposed method are checked by using formal verification (AVISPA) which has proved a high talent in automatically finding potential attacks in security protocols.