SRGH: A secure and robust group-based handover AKA protocol for MTC in LTE-A networks

Abstract

Machine-type communication (MTC) is defined as an automatic aggregation, processing, and exchange of information among intelligent devices without humans intervention. With the development of immense embedded devices, MTC is emerging as the leading communication technology for a wide range of applications and services in the Internet of Things (IoT). For achieving the reliability and to fulfill the security requirements of IoT-based applications, researchers have proposed some group-based handover authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols for mass MTCDs in LTE-A networks. However, the realization of secure handover authentication for the group of MTCDs in IoT enabled LTE-A network is an imminent issue. Whenever mass MTCDs enter into the coverage area of target base-station simultaneously, the protocols incur high signaling congestion. In addition, the existing group-based handover protocols suffer from the huge network overhead and numerous identified problems such as lack of key forward/backward secrecy, privacy-preservation. Moreover, the protocols fail to avoid the key escrow problem and vulnerable to malicious attacks. To overcome these issues, we propose a secure and robust group-based handover (SRGH) AKA protocol for mass MTCDs in LTE-A network. The protocol establishes the group key update mechanism with forward/backward secrecy. The formal security proof demonstrates that the protocol achieves all the security properties including session key secrecy and data integrity. Furthermore, the formal verification using the AVISPA tool shows the correctness and informal analysis discusses the resistance from various security problems. The performance evaluation illustrates that the proposed protocol obtains substantial efficiency compared with the existing group-based handover AKA protocols. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.