Improving the Security of LTE-R for High-Speed Railway: From the Access Authentication View

Security and efficiency are crucial considerations for Long Term Evolution for Railway (LTE-R) which bears real-time transmission of train control information for future high-speed railway. In this article, we first analyze the vulnerabilities of LTE-R access authentication protocol, and then propose a proxy signature based authentication scheme to enhance the security of LTE-R without sacrificing efficiency. The proposed scheme consists of three main security mechanisms: a novel Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem based Certificateless Proxy Signature (ECC-CLPS) designed for authentication security, a hash-based puzzle introduced to defend against denial of service (DoS) attack and a key pre-generation mechanism used to improve the efficiency of fast handover authentication. The security analysis and performance simulation show that our scheme has advantages over existing LTE-based authentication schemes in terms of security, functionality, computation and communication costs. Moreover, the authentication requirements for security and efficiency in different LTE-R communication scenarios are fully considered, which makes our scheme more suitable for the access authentication in the future LTE-R based high-speed railway.