Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Secure Traffic Signaling in 5G Networks

Security and privacy issues in 5G networks center around traceability, de-synchronization, impersonation, man-in-the-middle, linkability, message replays among others. Although 5G authentication and key agreement (5G-AKA), Extensible Authentication Protocol AKA (EAP-AKA) and EAP Transport Layer Security (EAP-TLS) have been introduced to boost security in these networks, numerous security flaws have been identified in these protocols that render them vulnerable. As such, there has been extensive research on alternative protocols to address these issues. However, the presented protocols still have many security and performance gaps. In this paper, hash signature based AKA protocol is developed. Its security evaluation shows that it is robust against several 5G attacks. It also has the lowest computation and communication overheads compared with the other related approaches.