Title: A GAA-based batch authentication and key agreement for LTE networks

Authors: Wujun Zhang; Xiaohui Wang; Yunya Zhou; Hua Deng; Yumin Wang

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks, Xidian University, 710071 Xi'an, China ' State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks, Xidian University, 710071 Xi'an, China ' School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China ' School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China ' State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks, Xidian University, 710071 Xi'an, China

Abstract: With the rapid development of mobile application, unified authentication becomes more and more important for avoiding the duplicated construction of authentication facilities for various applications. For cellular network, it could be well met by the generic authentication architecture (GAA) proposed by 3GPP. While under this architecture, congestion caused by redundant signalling will occur easily when massive mobile entities, such as machine-to-machine type devices, almost simultaneously access the service, which will reduce the quality of services, and even make the network unavailable. In this paper, a batch authentication and key agreement for LTE networks is proposed based on an improved GAA architecture to achieve end-to-end security in application layer. With the assistance of the network and aggregate signature, authentications signalling come from different entities are aggregated at application server. Compared with the current GAA, batch authentication makes our scheme eliminate the most redundant signalling, and thus could alleviate the extent of congestion. In addition, it could also reduce the authentication delay distinctly and is secure against various malicious attacks.

Keywords: generic authentication architecture; GAA; batch authentication; key agreement; aggregate signature; LTE networks; long-term evolution networks; network security; redundant signalling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2015.072372

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2015 Vol.7 No.3/4, pp.289 - 295

Received: 21 Jul 2014
Accepted: 16 Oct 2014
Published online: 11 Oct 2015 *

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