A Quantum Safe Key Hierarchy and Dynamic Security Association for LTE/SAE in 5G Scenario
This addresses security vulnerabilities for 5G networks, but it appears incremental as it builds on LTE architecture without significant modifications.
The paper tackles the security threats in 5G networks by proposing a Quantum Key GRID for Authentication and Key Agreement (QKG-AKA) scheme for dynamic security association, which is proven safe against quantum computers and shows drastic improvement in security and key management over existing schemes.
Millions of devices are going to participate in 5G producing a huge space for security threats. The 5G specification goals require rigid and robust security protocol against such threats. Quantum cryptography is a recently emerged term in which we test the robustness of security protocols against Quantum computers. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a security protocol called Quantum Key GRID for Authentication and Key Agreement (QKG-AKA) scheme for the dynamic security association. This scheme is efficiently deployed in Long Term Evolution (LTE) architecture without any significant modifications in the underlying base system. The proposed QKG-AKA mechanism is analyzed for robustness and proven safe against quantum computers. The simulation results and performance analysis show drastic improvement regarding security and key management over existing schemes.