Lightweight Batch AKA Scheme for User-Centric Ultra-Dense Networks

Ultra-dense networks (UDN) are considered as one of the key technologies for advancing the widespread deployment of 5G networks. To provide continuous and reliable connectivity to user devices and to achieve the integrity and authenticity of communication, UDN needs to address the challenges related to authentication and authorization of information. Existing authentication and key agreement (AKA) schemes are not appropriate for the ultra-dense deployment of access points due to excessive authentication and/or computation overhead. This paper proposes a novel lightweight batch authentication and key agreement (LBAKA) scheme for user-centric UDN scenarios by adopting lightweight batch authentication solution and one-to-one key agreement, and by using mutual authentication to verify the credibility of both sides of the communication. The proposed LBAKA can maintain privacy of identity information under replay, impersonation and man-in-the-middle attacks in user-centric UDNs. In terms of computation and communication overhead, our simulation results show that LBAKA outperforms other similar schemes in user-centric UDNs.