An Efficient Group-based Service Authentication and Session Key Negotiation Scheme for mMTC Devices in 5G

With the development of the telecommunication network, the core network is about to enter the era of 5G. 5G is considered an indispensable piece of the internet of everything closely related to our lives. Even some highly privacy-sensitive data like medical data can be transmitted, which makes the authentication before transmission and its security more critical. To fulfill these requirements, we first improve a lightweight certificateless signcryption scheme. After its security is proved, it is used to replace the security scheme defined by the 3^rd Generation Partnership Project ( Third Generation Partnership Project, http://​www.​3gpp.​org/​.) to enhance authentication security. However, the internet of everything massively increases the number of connected devices, the signaling overhead, and computational overhead when accessing services heavily burden the core network. Therefore, it will affect the user’s experience and increase network service providers' CAPEX and OPEX. To effectively release these burdens, we integrate the concept of group-based authentication into the improved certificateless signcryption scheme. We further designed a new group-based authentication procedure based on it. With one proposed procedure, many devices can get their session key or finish a simple transmission with the core network, decreasing the signaling and computational overhead. At last, the security and efficiency of our proposed procedure are justified by the security analysis and the performance evaluation.