SE-AKA: A secure and efficient group authentication and key agreement protocol for LTE networks

To support Evolved Packet System (EPS) in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has proposed an authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol, named EPS-AKA, which has become an emerging standard for fourth-generation (4G) wireless communications. However, due to the requirement of backward compatibility, EPS-AKA inevitably inherits some defects of its predecessor UMTS-AKA protocol that cannot resist several frequent attacks, i.e., redirection attack, man-in-the-middle attack, and DoS attack. Meanwhile, there are additional security issues associated with the EPS-AKA protocol, i.e., the lack of privacy-preservation and key forward/backward secrecy (KFS/KBS). In addition, there are new challenges with the emergence of group-based communication scenarios in authentication. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient AKA protocol, called SE-AKA, which can fit in with all of the group authentication scenarios in the LTE networks. Specifically, SE-AKA uses Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) to realize KFS/KBS, and it also adopts an asymmetric key cryptosystem to protect users' privacy. For group authentication, it simplifies the whole authentication procedure by computing a group temporary key (GTK). Compared with other authentication protocols, SE-AKA cannot only provide strong security including privacy-preservation and KFS/KBS, but also provide a group authentication mechanism which can effectively authenticate group devices. Extensive security analysis and formal verification by using proverif have shown that the proposed SE-AKA is secure against various malicious attacks. In addition, elaborate performance evaluations in terms of communication, computational and storage overhead also demonstrates that SE-AKA is more efficient than those existing protocols.