A new authentication and key agreement protocol for 5G wireless networks

Authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol is an important security mechanism for access services in mobile communication systems. The 3GPP group has standardized the AKA protocol for 5G mobile communication systems. Even though 5G AKA protocol has improved security compared with 3G and 4G AKA protocols, several studies have shown that some critical goals are still not fulfilled, such as violation of untracebility and lack of session key confirmation. In this article, we propose a security enhanced AKA protocol for 5G to overcome the previous identified weaknesses. In our protocol, random number based challenge-response mechanism is used to resist replay attacks, which also saves the communication cost since our protocol has no sequence number de-synchronization problem. Besides, our protocol guarantees the feature of session key confirmation, which allows the subscriber and serving network confirm that they share a session key after successful authentication. Through the formal verification of Proverif, the security of our proposed protocol is proved. Moreover, elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman mechanism is adopted by our protocol, and therefore the property of perfect forward secrecy can be achieved.