An Improved Privacy Authentication Protocol for 5G Mobile Networks

Mobile communication networks have always undergone continuous and rapid evolution since their launch as telephone networks only. From one generation to the next, services have multiplied and diversified to include data first, then video and many other services as they go along. This progress was followed by an exponential growth in the number of users and mobile devices, and consequently, in the volume of data traffic. Fifth Generation (5G) is a new generation of mobile telephony standards. This wireless telecommunications technology promises to revolutionize the way the world communicates by supporting a set of requirements such as quality of service, performance for the integration of new services and network security. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposed an Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol named 5G-AKA for the 5G network in order to improve the security requirements and surmount the vulnerabilities existing in EPS-AKA protocol of Fourth Generation (4G) network. In this work, we propose an improved and efficient authentication and key agreement protocol for 5G mobile network, that overcome the weakness discover in the existing 5G-AKA and using of lightweight cryptographic methods in order to increase the computational cost in different entities. For the validation and verification of our proposed, we use Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool to demonstrate that the objectives of authentication and security are checked. In addition, the performance evaluation in terms of different metrics illustrates that our solution outperforms several 3GPP authentication protocols.