A Novel PUF-Based Group Authentication and Data Transmission Scheme for NB-IoT in 3GPP 5G Networks

With the gradual commercialization of the fifth-generation (5G) network, the narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system would have potential and prospective applications in future relying on the infrastructure. Meanwhile, predictably, there are several security requirements to be satisfied, including concurrent access authentication for massive devices, identity privacy protection, physical attack resistance, application traffic security, etc. In this article, we present a novel group authentication and data transmission scheme using the physically unclonable function (PUF) for NB-IoT in which the output of PUF is viewed as shared root key to achieve the mutual authentication along with key agreement. By this scheme, a Group Leader is employed to aggregate and relay authentication information and, thus, it reduces the signaling cost and communication cost followed by activating attach request messages from a sea of devices. The network side as well can surely find fake ones through individual truncated authentication code and detect honest devices with high probability when aggregated authentication code is invalid. Furthermore, the revised security model and the formal verification tool Scyther are employed to evaluate the security of the scheme. Finally, performance analysis results show that our solution has the desired efficiency.