The 5G-AKA Authentication Protocol Privacy
This addresses privacy risks for 5G mobile users, offering a solution that is incremental by building on the existing protocol.
The paper tackles privacy vulnerabilities in the 5G-AKA authentication protocol, showing that most known attacks still apply despite improvements, and proposes a modified protocol that is formally proven to be sigma-unlinkable and mutually authenticating.
We study the 5G-AKA authentication protocol described in the 5G mobile communication standards. This version of AKA tries to achieve a better privacy than the 3G and 4G versions through the use of asymmetric randomized encryption. Nonetheless, we show that except for the IMSI-catcher attack, all known attacks against 5G-AKA privacy still apply. Next, we modify the 5G-AKA protocol to prevent these attacks, while satisfying the cost and efficiency constraints of the 5G-AKA protocol. We then formally prove that our protocol is sigma-unlinkable. This is a new security notion, which allows for a fine-grained quantification of a protocol privacy. Our security proof is carried out in the Bana-Comon indistinguishability logic. We also prove mutual authentication as a secondary result.