Enabling Second Factor Authentication for Drones in 5G using Network Slicing

As 5G systems are starting to be deployed and becoming part of many daily life applications, there is an increasing interest on the security of the overall system as 5G network architecture is significantly different than LTE systems. For instance, through application specific virtual network slices, one can trigger additional security measures depending on the sensitivity of the running application. Drones utilizing 5G could be a perfect example as they pose several safety threats if they are compromised. To this end, we propose a stronger authentication mechanism inspired from the idea of second-factor authentication in IT systems. Specifically, once the primary 5G authentication is executed, a specific slice can be tasked to trigger a second-factor authentication utilizing different factors from the primary one. This trigger mechanism utilizes the re-authentication procedure as specified in the 3GPP 5G standards for easy integration. Our second-factor authentication uses a special challenge-response protocol, which relies on unique drone digital ID as well as a seed and nonce generated from the slice to enable freshness. We implemented the proposed protocol in ns-3 that supports mmWave-based communication in 5G. We demonstrate that the proposed protocol is lightweight and can scale while enabling stronger security for the drones.

I. Introduction

5G standard comes with significant changes to existing cellular standards 4G/LTE to improve performance, scalability and coverage to support millions of users and devices [1]. In particular, the new 5G architecture comes with a paradigm change which relies on network slicing and virtual network functions that can be utilized on demand. In addition, for radio access, 5G adds the use of millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies which boost data rates significantly. Finally, 5G offers integration of heterogeneous networks to support enhanced coverage through various types of base-stations.