A secure and efficient handover authentication and key management protocol for 5G networks

As a major component of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, network densification greatly increases the network capacity by adding more cell sites into the network. However, the densified network increases the handover frequency of fast-moving mobile users, like vehicles. Thus, seamless handover with security provision is highly desirable in 5G networks. The third generation partnership project (3GPP) has been working on standardization of the handover procedure in 5G networks to meet the stringent efficiency and security requirement. However, the existing handover authentication process in 5G networks has security flaws, i.e. vulnerable to replay and de-synchronization attacks, and cannot provide perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient handover authentication and key management protocol utilizing the Chinese remainder theory. The proposed scheme preserves the majority part of the original 5G system architecture defined by 3GPP, thus can be easily implemented in practice. Formal security analysis based on BAN-logic shows that the proposed scheme achieves secure mutual authentication and can remedy some security flaws in original 5G handover process. Performance analysis shows that the proposed protocol has lower communication overhead and computation overhead compared with other handover authentication schemes. © 2020, Posts and Telecom Press Co Ltd. All rights reserved.