A novel group-based secure lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol for machine-type communication

Nowadays, one of the most important criteria in designing different generations of cellular technology is to handle a large number of heterogeneous devices with high security guarantees. The first significant security issue considered in this field is the mutual authentication of the devices and the network as well as the authenticated key agreement between them. Hence, various Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocols were proposed for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G networks. However, each of the protocols suffers various security and performance issues. This study proposes a Group-based Secure Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement (GSL-AKA) protocol for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication. Security analysis and formal verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security-sensitive Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool prove that the proposed protocol overcomes various known security attacks and provides all the considered security requirements. Moreover, performance analysis shows that the communication and computation overheads of the proposed protocol are the lowest of all other existing group-based AKA protocols. (c) 2022 Sharif University of Technology. All rights reserved.