UniHand: Privacy-preserving Universal Handover for Small-Cell Networks in 5G-enabled Mobile Communication with KCI Resilience

Rabiah Alnashwan; Prosanta Gope; Benjamin Dowling

Paper 2024/433

UniHand: Privacy-preserving Universal Handover for Small-Cell Networks in 5G-enabled Mobile Communication with KCI Resilience

Rabiah Alnashwan

, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, The University of Sheffield

Prosanta Gope

, The University of Sheffield

Benjamin Dowling

, The University of Sheffield

Abstract

Introducing Small Cell Networks (SCN) has significantly improved wireless link quality, spectrum efficiency and network capacity, which has been viewed as one of the key technologies in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile network. However, this technology increases the frequency of handover (HO) procedures caused by the dense deployment of cells in the network with reduced cell coverage, bringing new security and privacy issues. The current 5G-AKA and HO protocols are vulnerable to security weaknesses, such as the lack of forward secrecy and identity confusion attacks. The high HO frequency of HOs might magnify these security and privacy concerns in the 5G mobile network. This work addresses these issues by proposing a secure privacy-preserving universal HO scheme UniHand for SCNs in 5G mobile communication. UniHand can achieve mutual authentication, strong anonymity, perfect forward secrecy, key-escrow-free and key compromise impersonation (KCI) resilience. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scheme to achieve secure, privacy-preserving universal HO with KCI resilience for roaming users in 5G environment. We demonstrate that our proposed scheme is resilient against all the essential security threats by performing a comprehensive formal security analysis and conducting relevant experiments to show the cost-effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)
Keywords: Universal Handover 5G SCN Authentication Privacy KCI Resilience.
Contact author(s): ralnashwan @ imamu edu sa
p gope @ sheffield ac uk
b dowling @ sheffield ac uk
History: 2024-03-15: approved; 2024-03-13: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2024/433
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/433,
      author = {Rabiah Alnashwan and Prosanta Gope and Benjamin Dowling},
      title = {UniHand: Privacy-preserving Universal Handover for Small-Cell Networks in 5G-enabled Mobile Communication with KCI Resilience},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2024/433},
      year = {2024},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/433}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/433}
}