A novel group-based secure lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol for machine-type communication

Nowadays, one of the most important criterions in designing different generations of cellular technology is to handle a large number of heterogeneous devices with high security guarantees. The first significant security issue considered in this field is mutual authentication of the devices and the network and authenticated key agreement between them. Hence, various authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols were proposed for Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G networks. However, each of the protocols suffer from various security and performance problems. This paper proposes a group-based secure lightweight authentication and key agreement (GSL-AKA) protocol for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Security analysis and formal verification using the AVISPA tool prove that the proposed protocol overcomes various known security attacks and provides all the considered security requirements. Moreover, performance analysis shows that the communication and computation overheads of the proposed protocol are the lowest in comparison with the other existing group-based AKA protocols.