A Provably Secure and Efficient 5G-AKA Authentication Protocol using Blockchain

The next generation of mobile communication systems must be secured because of the ongoing entrance of numerous security attacks. Thus, to secure the underlying network, the 3GPP has designed an authentication and key agreement protocol, 5GAKA, to safely and stably access the mobile services. However, some recent observations indicate that 5G-AKA has numerous shortcomings such as perfect forward secrecy violation, malicious Serving Network (SN), de-synchronization attack, privacy theft, stolen device, and denial of Service (DoS) attacks when the user uses the roaming mobile services. Considering the shortcomings of existing protocols and the requirement to offer increased security, we propose a provable secure, efficient 5G-AKA authentication protocol using the blockchain. The security features of the proposed protocol are examined using the Real-Or-Random (ROR) logic and Scyther tool. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated, which shows that it is the least costly compared to its counterparts in terms of computational and communication costs. In addition, the comparison of the Ethereum blockchain depicts that the proposed protocol takes less transaction and execution costs compared to its counterparts.