Design of Secure Authentication Handover Protocol for Innovative Mobile Multimedia Services in 5G MEC Environments

5G advanced technology has introduced innovative multimedia services, thus propelling the rise of the mobile multimedia market. While the ubiquity of mobile multimedia services has boosted customer convenience, it has also unlocked the way to possible security concerns that potentially damage users' privacy and service providers' properties. Several standards and researches have been proposed to counter these threats, notably those concentrating on authentication between users and service applications. Unfortunately, these studies are limited to address a new challenge, secure handover among distributed application functions in 5G Multi-access Edge Cloud (MEC) environments. Motivated by this, we present a handover authentication protocol with push-key and pull-key optimization options in 5G mobile multimedia application services. The proposed protocol provides mutual authentication, secure key exchange, confidentiality, and integrity. Furthermore, it also supports perfect forward secrecy, optimal handover, and anonymity, which were not previously considered in prior studies. While formal verification through BAN Logic and Scyther proved that the protocol is secure against attacks that violate the supported security requirements, comparative analysis of the proposed protocol against existing studies demonstrates that the protocol is simultaneously efficient.