OTFS-based efficient handover authentication scheme with privacy-preserving for high mobility scenarios

Handover authentication in high mobility scenarios is characterized by frequent and short-term parallel execution. Moreover, the penetration loss and Doppler frequency shift caused by high speed also lead to the deterioration of network link quality. Therefore, high mobility scenarios require handover schemes with less handover overhead. However, some existing schemes that meet this requirement cannot provide strong security guarantees, while some schemes that can provide strong security guarantees have large handover overheads. To solve this dilemma, we propose a privacy-preserving handover authentication scheme that can provide strong security guarantees with less computational cost. Based on Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) link and Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), we establish the shared key between protocol entities in the initial authentication phase, thereby reducing the overhead in the handover phase. Our proposed scheme can achieve mutual authentication and key agreement among the user equipment, relay node, and authentication server. We demonstrate that our proposed scheme can achieve user anonymity, unlinkability, perfect forward secrecy, and resistance to various attacks through security analysis including the Tamarin. The performance evaluation results show that our scheme has a small computational cost compared with other schemes and can also provide a strong guarantee of security properties.