A provably group authentication protocol for various LTE networks

Abstract

Group authentication is beneficial for group work in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks because it reduces the traffic of networks. For practical use, members of a group should be able to come from different network providers. In addition, while some group members use a network service, others may use other network services. Although the group members are on different networks, they should be able to work together. To fulfill these needs, we propose a secure group authentication protocol (SEGA) in which each group member uses his/her long-term private key and public key to create shared secret (keys) with network devices, such as Home and mobile management entity (MME). These shared keys are computed by using the DiffieHellman key exchange and are utilized in the authentication process. By using this technique instead of pre-shared keys between mobile devices and network devices, SEGA is flexible and scalable. In SE-GA, only the first member in an MME’s area has to authenticate himself/herself with the Home, while the remaining members in the area can authenticate directly with the MME. Thus the protocol reduces the amount of network usage. In this research, authentication proof is also given using the well-known BAN logic. Security analysis of the proposed protocol is also given and a comparison of our protocol with SE-AKA and GLARM was demonstrated. According to the comparison, we can see that the proposed protocol outperforms the former ones.