Practical and Secure Password Authentication and Key-Agreement-Scheme-Based Dual Server for IoT Devices in 5G Network

As the proliferation of 5th generation mobile communication technology (5G) accelerates the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, building robust and secure communication channel becomes increasingly crucial with the exponential growth of connected devices. The third generation partnership project (3GPP) has established security standards for the 5G systems, including mechanisms, such as 5G-authentication and key agreement (5G-AKA), which enable secure sessions with untrustworthy participants or insecure channels. The private key with untrustworthy parties has been independently or transmitted through insecure channels, which may involve a risk of information leakage in 5G-AKA. Motivated by this challenge, we propose a practical and secure dual-server key agreement scheme based on password authentication for the IoT devices in the 5G networks. The scheme ensures secure reliable key storage and key transmission, mitigating the risks associated with key information leakage through a dual-server architecture and a three-lock security policy. Importantly, we avoid ownership of the complete key by any untrustworthy entity in an insecure 5G network to ensure key security. The scheme can be resilient to various security threats prevalent in 5G networks through rigorous formal security. We analyse the communication and computational loads to illustrate the protocol’s practicality and efficacy.