PSE-AKA: Performance and security enhanced authentication key agreement protocol for IoT enabled LTE/LTE-A networks

Abstract

In the mobile telecommunication network, Long term Evolution (LTE) is the most successful technological development for the industrial services and applications. The Evolved Packet System based Authentication and Key Agreement (EPS-AKA) was the first protocol proposed to authenticate the communication entities in the LTE network. But, the EPS-AKA protocol suffers from the single key exposure problem and is susceptible to various security attacks. Also, the protocol incurs high bandwidth consumption and computation overhead over the communication network. Moreover, the protocol doesn’t support the Internet of Things (IoT) based applications and has several security issues such as the privacy violation of the user identity and key set identifier (KSI). To resolve the above problems, various AKA protocols were proposed by the researchers. Unfortunately, none of the protocols succeeded to overcome the privacy preservation and single key exposure problem from the communication network. In this paper, we propose the performance and security enhanced (PSE-AKA) protocol for IoT enabled LTE/LTE-A network. The proposed protocol follows the cocktail therapy to generate the authentication vectors that improves the performance in terms of computation and communication overhead. The protocol preserves the privacy of objects, protects the KSI and avoids the identified attacks from the communication network. The formal verification and security analysis of the proposed protocol is carried out using the BAN logic and AVISPA tool respectively. The security analysis shows that the protocol achieves the security goals and secure against various known attacks. Finally, the performance analysis shows that the proposed protocol generates the less overhead and reduces the bandwidth consumption from the network. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.