Dependability Analysis of 5G-AKA Authentication Service From Server and User Perspectives

The fifth generation (5G) technology offers a set of security services in order to provide secure communication to a large number of various devices. 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) authentication service acts as the first step of securing the 5G network communication. This paper aims to quantitatively analyze the dependability of 5G-AKA authentication service. We develop the continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) models to capture the operational details of the 5G-AKA authentication services when facing the service failure. We also derive formulas for calculating metrics of interest, including Defects Per Million (DPM), authentication service's first restoration time from failure and total cost of ownership (TCO). Extensive numerical analysis is applied to investigate the impact of parameters on the evaluation metrics.