GSLHA: Group-based Secure Lightweight Handover Authentication Protocol for M2M Communication

Machine to machine (M2M) communication, which is also known as machine type communication (MTC), is one of the fascinating parts of mobile communication technology and also an important practical application of the Internet of Things. The main objective of this type of communication is handling massive heterogeneous devices with low network overheads and high security guarantees. Hence, various protocols and schemes were proposed to achieve security requirements in M2M communication and reduce computational and communication costs. In this paper, we propose the group-based secure, lightweight handover authentication (GSLHA) protocol for M2M communication in LTE and future 5G networks. The proposed protocol mutually authenticates a group of MTC devices (MTCDs) and a new eNodeB (eNB) when these simultaneously enter the coverage of the eNB with considering all the cellular network requirements. The security analysis and formal verification by using the AVISPA tool show that the proposed protocol has been able to achieve all the security goals and overcome various attacks. In addition, the comparative performance analysis of the handover authentication protocols shows that the proposed GSLHA protocol has the best computational and communication overheads.