LGTH: A lightweight group authentication protocol for machine-type communication in LTE networks

Supporting a massive number of machine-type communication (MTC) devices has been considered as an essential requirement in machine to machine (M2M) communications. Meanwhile, cyber security is of paramount importance in MTC; if MTC devices cannot securely access the networks through efficient authentication, all applications involving MTC cannot be widely accepted. One of research challenges in MTC is group authentication. A large number of MTC devices accessing the network simultaneously will cause a severe authentication signaling congestion. To solve this problem and reduce authentication overhead of the previous schemes based on public key cryptosystems, we propose a novel lightweight group authentication protocol for MTC in the long term evolution (LTE) networks based on aggregate message authentication codes (MACs), called LGTH, which can not only authenticate all MTC devices simultaneously, but also minimize the authentication overhead. Through security analysis, we conclude that the proposed LGTH can provide robust security, and avoid the authentication signaling congestion in the LTE networks. In addition, performance evaluations in terms of communication and computation overhead demonstrate that LGTH is more efficient than previous schemes.