An effective approach to solving large communication overhead issue and strengthening the securities of AKA protocols

作者：Chien Hung Yu^*

来源：International Journal of Communication Systems, 2018, 31(1): e3381.

DOI：10.1002/dac.3381

• authentication
• authentication
• Internet-of-things
• key agreement
• LTE
• UMTS

Authentication and key agreement (AKA) is a challenge-response-like security protocol that uses symmetric-key cryptography to establish authenticated keys between 2 parties. Its application in the third-generation mobile system universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) is called UMTS-AKA, and the version applied in the fourth-generation mobile communication system long-term evolution (LTE) is called LTE-AKA. Both UMTS-AKA and LTE-AKA share the same weakness: the network operators need to maintain a large space of authentication vectors for visiting stations, and the transmission of the vectors causes lots of overhead. This weakness will be amplified when there are billions of devices accessing the network in the Internet-of-things scenarios. In addition, these schemes provide only key distribution (not key agreement) and cannot provide session key forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose a range-bound key assignment technique to tackle the challenges. The proposed scheme drastically reduces the communication overhead and greatly strengthens the security robustness. The securities are analyzed and are verified using the AVISPA toolset.

• 出版日期2018-1-10