Mitigating Signaling Storms in 5G with Blockchain-assisted 5GAKA

This paper examines the registration signaling storm attack in 5G networks. This attack is initiated by massive registration requests and targets the 5G core network functions, leading to large-scale user service disruption. To mitigate this problem, we review the 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (5GAKA) protocol and highlight the impact of the exposure of the 5G core network (CN) to massive registration requests. We propose a blockchain-based authentication protocol to effectively block adversarial registration requests and secure the 5G network at a small cost. Our experiments reveal that our protocol is resistant to attacks and prove its superiority compared to a baseline mitigation approach.