A Proxy Signature Based Efficient and Robust Handover AKA Protocol for LTE/LTE-A Networks

An efficient and robust handover is one of the essential requirements of several applications in LTE/LTE-A network. These applications are reliable only after a successful authentication of communication entities. Hence, the third generation partnership project has recommended the handover schemes for different mobility scenarios with a new key management approach that increases the complexity of the overall system. To overcome the above problems, researchers have proposed various handover authentication protocols. But, most of the handover protocols can’t avoid the key escrow problem and suffers from key forward/backward secrecy. Also, these protocols are vulnerable to various malicious attacks and incur high computational overhead during the authentication process. Therefore, these protocols don’t suit for handover authentication in LTE/LTE-A networks. However, researchers have proposed the proxy signature based handover protocols but, these protocols fail to achieve an adequate solution for proxy revocation and necessary security demands. In order to mitigate the aforesaid problems, we propose a proxy signature based efficient and robust handover authentication and key agreement protocol with revocation in LTE/LTE-A network. To prove the correctness of the proposed protocol, the formal analysis is carried out by BAN logic and simulated using the AVISPA tool. Moreover, the security analysis illustrates that the proposed protocol fulfills all the security features and avoids the identified attacks. Finally, the performance analysis of the proposed protocol is shown with existing handover protocols. The analysis shows that the protocol has improved results in terms of transmission, storage, message and computation overhead.