A secure and light-weighted group based authentication and key agreement protocol involving ecdh for machine type communications in 3gpp networks

Abstract

Machine-Type Communications (MTC) is one of the primary aspects of Internet of Things (IoT) which has gained vast markets and application scenarios. In the recent times, an enormous surge in the number of low cost and low-powered Machine Type Communicating Devices (MTCDs) is observed that tend to connect and cause severe congestions, at times, in the network thus bringing down network’s quality of service drastically. Conditionally, all the MTCDs must be mutually authenticated successfully for the corresponding application to be reliable. In the process of authentication and key agreement, the participating MTCDs, high or low configured, need to exchange several control messages with the other participating entities and the servers of the network, leading to overburden and ineffective service delivery. As most of the MTCDs are the constrained devices, lightweight computations are desirable for them without any compromise in its security aspect. In our paper, we have proposed the Secure and Lightweight Group Based Authentication and Key Agreement (SL-Grp-AKA) protocol based on Elliptic-Curve Diffie–Hellman cryptography, where the group of such MTCDs is authenticated simultaneously by the authorized Home Subscriber Server (HSS), also responsible for authentication in the wireless networks. Also, the independent session keys are established with the individual MTCD, to be used for further data transmission securely in our protocol. SL-Grp-AKA guarantees the efficient usage of bandwidth by reducing the congestions caused by the exchange of the control signals. The formal analysis is also performed on SL-Grp-AKA using the well-known AVISPA tool and achieved desirable results and enlisted. The cryptanalysis is performed for establishing its strength as well as the performance evaluation for its computational speed and bandwidth consumption. Towards the end of the paper, we have explored and presented the future scope in this direction.