Cross-Network-Slice Authentication Scheme for the 5th Generation Mobile Communication System

The fifth-generation mobile network (5G) integrates various application services in a heterogeneous network environment. Compared to the traditional networks, 5G is not just an extension of the 4th generation, which contains three important properties, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC). 5G applies the functionalities of Network Function Virtualization and Software-Defined Networking to support multiple services and proposes a new concept called Network Slicing. Users can access different services quickly in the 5G network supported by network slicing. In a traditional network like 4G, if a user wants to access different services, it will be necessary to perform different authentication procedures that cause additional burden and operation cost in the user’s device. However, the 5G network inherits the previous network architecture. Hence, the user’s device still needs to be authenticated by the core network. Besides, providing a guarantee of connecting to a correct network slice is one of the prime concerns. The paper presents an authentication scheme tailored for the 5G network. In the proposed scheme, the authentication is decentralized to the edge clouds to achieve low latency. Moreover, the authentication flow is no longer attached to the operator all the time to reduce time latency. The proposed scheme is secure against the attackers who aim to impersonate users, network operators, or even network slices, and it also provides secure session key exchange. Empirical performance assessment in terms of its functionalities gains better acceptability of the proposed scheme than other existing ones.