SEGB: Security Enhanced Group Based AKA Protocol for M2M Communication in an IoT Enabled LTE/LTE-A Network

Nowadays machine to machine (M2M) communication and its applications are growing tremendously around the globe as millions of devices are communicating with each other in an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled long term evolution (LTE)/LTE-advanced (LTE-A) network. These applications are effective and secure only after the successful verification of machine type communication devices (MTCDs). Hence, various group-based authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols were proposed in the literature to achieve the authentication. These protocols fulfill all the security requirements such as privacy preservation, mutual authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. But, none of them have the credential to overcome the single key problem in the communication network. In addition, they do not have the efficacy to maintain the group key unlink-ability and are susceptible to the identified attacks. In some of the protocols, each MTCD needs to authenticate independently to simultaneously access the communication network that generates network congestion overhead. In view of these problems, we propose the security enhanced groupbased (SEGB) AKA protocol for M2M communication in an IoT-enabled LTE/LTE-A network. The SEGBAKA protocol solves the problem of the single key during the authentication process and achieves the key forward/backward secrecy. The protocol overcomes the problem of signaling congestion and high bandwidth consumption. The formal security analysis of the protocol is carried out by the automated Internet security protocols and applications tool. The security analysis shows that the protocol achieves the security goals and is free from various known attacks. Moreover, the performance of the proposed SEGB-AKA protocol is analyzed with the existing group-based AKA protocols. The analysis shows that the protocol has better results in terms of network overheads and fulfills all the security requirements of M2M communication.