Enhancing Secure 5G-AKA Protocol Using ASCON Lightweight Cryptography

Abstract

With the rapid development of communication generations and fifth generation (5G) networks, network security issues have become more prominent, and mutual authentication between users and networks has become crucial to protect privacy and prevent cyber-attacks. Authentication has evolved from previous generations such as GSM, CDMA, UMTS and LTE to 5G, which relies on protocols such as 5G-AKA and EAP-AKA'. The 5G-AKA protocol is one of the most important authentication protocols for securing 3GPP equipment, but it faces security challenges such as Link attacks. 5G-AKA is constantly being improved to support forward secrecy and address security attacks, requiring new improvements to mitigate these challenges.

This paper proposes to apply a lightweight algorithm, the ASCON algorithm, to replace the AES used in the 5G-AKA standard that performs encryption and additional authentication simultaneously, which enhances the efficiency and strong security of the exchange of authentication parameters between UE and HN. The protocol was implemented using a Mininet and Python network emulator to integrate the algorithm within a 5G network architecture. Evaluation metrics based on NIST criteria, such as memory usage (current and peak), entropy, and avalanche effect, showed a clear performance improvement compared to the previous protocol version using AES.