A UAV-Assisted UE Access Authentication Scheme for 5G/6G Network

Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with base stations can assist ground User Equipments (UEs) in accessing the 5G/6G network. Due to the UAV’s high autonomy, easy configuration, and strong dynamic deployment capabilities, UAV-assisted ground UEs to access the 5G/6G network can effectively expand the communication network coverage. However, some vulnerabilities exist, such as eavesdropping attack, impersonation attack, etc. In addition, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) committee has proposed that the UAV can employ the primary authentication mechanism (i.e., 5G-AKA) to connect to the network. Nevertheless, the primary authentication mechanism 5G-AKA has some security problems. In this paper, we first improve the existing 5G-AKA, which resists quantum attack and traceability attack and consumes moderate signaling overhead and short running time. Then, based on the improved 5G-AKA protocol, we propose a UAV-assisted UE access authentication scheme for the 5G/6G network. In the proposed scheme, the UAV can perform the service access authentication process to access the 5G/6G core network and then execute the UAV-assisted UE access authentication process to assist UE in obtaining network services. Additionally, the ground UE can perform a fast and secure handover process with the target UAV to ensure continuous network services. The automation verification tool Tamarin is employed to verify the security of the proposed scheme. Additionally, we implement the improved 5G-AKA protocol and the existing 5G-AKA protocol on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to test their running time. The security and performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme provides robust security with moderate efficiency.