Remote Registration and Group Authentication of IoT Devices in 5G Cellular Network

The Fifth Generation (5G) of cellular mobile network, due its speed and flexibility, will be a preferred communication technology for future deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, with the rapid growth in the number of connected devices, registration and authentication of the devices in 5G cellular network are set to become challenging tasks. Currently, the basis for registration and authentication of the devices in 5G mobile network is the Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) that is provided to every device. But, with large scale deployments in IoT, providing a USIM and authenticating every device individually is going to be arduous. Recently, several group based authentication protocols have been proposed by researchers. Even so, none of these proposals can be easily adopted, since they are not based on the challenge response mechanism used in the 5G Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol (5G-AKA). In this paper, an efficient scheme for remote registration and group authentication of the IoT devices in 5G cellular network is proposed. The scheme is designed to work along with 5G-AKA protocol as its extension. It uses elliptic curve cryptography that is lightweight in nature and is suitable for resource constrained IoT environment. Security analysis and performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secured and efficient in comparison to similar recent proposals in the literature.