LEGA:A Lightweight and Efficient Group Authentication Protocol for Massive Machine Type Communication in 5G Networks

Massive machine type communication(mMTC)is anticipated to be an essential part of fifth generation(5G)networks.The main challenge for mMTC devices(mMTCDs)is the design of an access authentication scheme that can fulfill the security and privacy requirements of 5G applications,which have specific conditions,including rigorous latency and si-multaneous access.Thus,a novel 5G authentication and key agreement(5G-AKA)protocol was introduced by the 3rd generation partnership project(3GPP)to achieve mMTCD access authentication.However,5G-AKA protocol comes with some security vulnerabilities and significant delay for real-time mMTC applications,particularly when mMTCDs concurrently roam into new networks.In order to address the real-time secure and efficient access issues of multiple mMTCDs,this paper proposes a lightweight and efficient group authen-tication protocol for mMTC in 5G wireless networks.The proposed protocol,which integrates bilinear maps and an aggregate certificateless signature mechanism,can achieve several security goals,including avoidance of signaling congestion in the authentication process,mutual authentication,session key agreement,perfect forward/backward secrecy,and masked attack and key escrow resistance.Compared to existing conventional protocols,the proposed protocol demonstrates robust security and improved performance in terms of signaling cost authentication,bandwidth consumption and compu-tational cost.