An Authentication Protocol for 5G Network Slicing supporting Cross Slicing and Cross Operator Access

Abstract

The 5G network technology, which is the fifth generation of mobile networks, provides quicker data transfer speeds, increased capacity, and reduced latency compared to previ ous generations. Additionally, it makes possible brand-new use cases and applications like smart cities, driverless vehicles, and remote surgery, all of which need an extremely de pendable and responsive network. Network slicing is an essential technology within the 5G framework that allows the network to be tailored and adapted to specific applications and purposes. This allows service providers to offer differentiated services with varying per formance, reliability, and security levels while maximizing resource utilization and revenue opportunities. To get the benefits of these differentiated services, the users need to switch among slices which may be under the same operator (cross-slice) or a different operator (cross-operator). However, it is seen that most of the protocols do not offer the cross-slice and cross-operator and are also vulnerable to several kinds of attacks, such as anonymity, session-linkability, replay attack, stolen device attack, ephemeral secret leakage, and violate perfect forward secrecy too. Considering the above requirements, we designed authenti cation protocols that offer these features and are secure against all attacks. We analyse the proposed scheme’s security characteristics both formally (using the Scyther tool) and in formally, demonstrating that our scheme meets all security requirements. Additionally, we gauge the efficiency of the protocols on various factors like communication cost, storage cost and computation cost. Our findings demonstrate that, in comparison to its competitors, the suggested approach achieves a more optimal equilibrium between performance and security.