SEAI: Secrecy and Efficiency Aware Inter-gNB Handover Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol in 5G Communication Network

Recently, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has initiated the research in the Fifth Generation (5G) network to fulfill the security characteristics of IoT-based services. 3GPP has proposed the 5G handover key structure and framework in a recently published technical report. In this paper, we evaluate the handover authentication mechanisms reported in the literature and identify the security vulnerabilities such as violation of global base-station attack, failure of key forward/backward secrecy, de-synchronization attack, and huge network congestion. Also, these protocols suffer from high bandwidth consumption that doesn't suitable for energy-efficient mobile devices in the 5G communication network. To overcome these issues, we introduce Secrecy and Efficiency Aware Inter-gNB (SEAI) handover Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol. The formal security proof of the protocol is carried out by Random Oracle Model (ROM) to achieve the session key secrecy, confidentiality, and integrity. For the protocol correctness and achieve the mutual authentication, simulation is performed using the AVISPA tool. Also, the informal security evaluation represents that the protocol defeats all the possible attacks and achieves the necessary security properties.Moreover, the performance evaluation of the earlier 5G handover schemes and proposed SEAI handover AKA protocol is carried out in terms of communication, transmission, computation overhead, handover delay, and energy consumption. From the evaluations, it is observed that the SEAI handover AKA protocol obtains significant results and strengthens the security of the 5G network during handover scenarios.