Anti-Quantum Fast Authentication and Data Transmission Scheme for Massive Devices in 5G NB-IoT System

The narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system has become an integral part of the future fifth generation (5G) network. Although the NB-IoT system has gradually been improved in the traditional LTE network currently, the NB-IoT system does not have an effective access authentication scheme in the future 5G network. According to the current 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard, NB-IoT devices still use the traditional access authentication method to perform mutual authentication with the network, which may bring a large amount of signaling and communication overhead. This problem will be magnified in a large-scale device environment in the future 5G network. In this article, a quantum resistance access authentication and data distribution scheme is proposed for large-scale NB-IoT devices. The scheme can simultaneously implement access authentication and data transmission of a group of NB-IoT devices based on the lattice-based homomorphic encryption technology. Our scheme not only greatly reduce the network burden but also achieve strong security, including privacy protection and anti-quantum attacks. The performance analysis results show that our scheme has the ideal efficiency.