Security Authentication Protocol for Massive Machine Type Communication in 5G Networks

As one of the three major applications of 5G, massive machine type communication (mMTC) is mainly oriented to network access scenarios for massive devices. mMTC focuses on solving the problem that traditional mobile communication cannot well support the Internet of Things and vertical industry applications. According to the current 3GPP standard, these massive devices still use the traditional authentication process to realize mutual authentication with 5G core network, which brings a lot of communication and computing overhead. In addition, privacy protection will also be threatened in the authentication process. In order to alleviate the signaling congestion during authentication and solve the insecurity in authentication, this paper proposes a group authentication scheme for mMTC. Due to the characteristics of low power consumption and massive connection, the scheme mainly adopts lightweight encryption operation to avoid the computational burden of equipment and server. We verify the security of our scheme by using BAN logic to formally analyze the scheme. Then, through informal analysis, our proposed scheme can not only avoid signaling blocking and provide mutual authentication but also resist various possible attacks. Through performance evaluation, it is proved that our scheme has better efficiency. © 2023 Junfeng Miao et al.