Towards Security and Privacy Preservation in 5G Networks

The Fifth Generation (5G) networks support various service delivery models such as Device to Device (D2D) communication, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETS) among others. In these networks, massive personal and private data items are being exchanged among numerous heterogeneous devices. As such, security and privacy leaks can have devastating repercussions. Many protocols have been presented for device authentication, starting with Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) introduced by the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Numerous attacks have been described against this AKA protocol and hence other schemes have been presented in literature. Although they address some of these security and privacy issues, some of these schemes are inefficient while others are still susceptible to other attacks. In this paper, a protocol that protects the exchanged packets against ephemeral leakages, man-in-the-middle, impersonation and offline guessing attacks is presented. In terms of bandwidth requirements and execution time, the proposed protocol had the lowest values among its peers.