Security Vulnerabilities in Handover Authentication Mechanism of 5G Network

The main objective of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is to fulfill the increasing security demands of IoT-based applications with the evolution of Fifth Generation (5G) mobile telecommunication technology. In June 2018, the 3GPP has published the study report of the handover architecture and security functions of in 5G communication network. In this paper, we discuss the 5G handover key mechanism with its key hierarchy. In addition, the inter-gNB handover authentication mechanism in 5G communication network is analyzed and identify the security vulnerabilities such as false base-station attack, de-synchronization attack, key compromise, etc. In addition, the handover mechanism suffers from authentication complexity due to high signaling overhead. To overcome these problems, we recommend some countermeasures as pre-authentication of communication entities, delegation of authentication and pre-distribution of secret keys. This is first work in the 5G handover security analysis. We anticipate that the above security issues and key resilience problem can be avoided from the proposed solutions.