AKA-PLA: Enhanced AKA Based on Physical Layer Authentication

• Jing Yang,
• Xinsheng Ji,
• Kaizhi Huang,
• Ming Yi,
• Yajun Chen,

Vol. 11, No. 7, July 30, 2017
10.3837/tiis.2017.07.024, Download Paper (Free):

• authentication
• channel characteristics
• cross-layer
• false alarm rate
• missing rate

Abstract

Existing authentication mechanisms in cellular mobile communication networks are realized in the upper layer by employing cryptographic techniques. Authentication data are broadcasted over the air in plaintext, enabling attackers to completely eavesdrop on the authentication and get some information about the shared secret key between legitimate nodes. Therefore, reusing the same secret key to authenticate several times results in the secret key’s information leakage and high attacking rate. In this paper, we consider the most representative authentication mechanism, Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA), in cellular communication networks and propose an enhanced AKA scheme based on Physical Layer Authentication (AKA-PLA). Authentication responses generated by AKA are no longer transmitted in plaintext but masked by wireless channel characteristics, which are not available to adversaries, to generate physical layer authentication responses by a fault-tolerant hash method. The authenticator sets the threshold according to the authentication requirement and channel condition, further verifies the identity of the requester based on the matching result of the physical layer authentication responses. The performance analyses show that the proposed scheme can achieve lower false alarm rate and missing rate, which are a pair of contradictions, than traditional AKA. Besides, it is well compatible with AKA.

Statistics

Cite this article