ReHand: Secure Region-Based Fast Handover With User Anonymity for Small Cell Networks in Mobile Communications

Abstract

Due to the expectedly higher density of mobile devices and exhaust of radio resources, the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks introduce small cell concept in the radio access technologies, so-called Small Cell Networks (SCNs), to improve radio spectrum utilization. However, this increases the chance of handover due to smaller coverage of a micro base station, i.e., home eNodeB (HeNB) in 5G. Subsequently, the latency will increase as the costs of authenticated key exchange protocol, which ensures entity authentication and communication confidentiality for secure handover, also increase totally. Thus, this work presents a secure region-based handover scheme (ReHand) with user anonymity and fast revocation for SCNs in 5G. ReHand greatly reduces the communication costs when UEs roam between small cells within the region of a macro base station, i.e., eNB in 5G, and the computation costs due to the employment of symmetry-based cryptographic operations. Compared to the three elaborated related works, ReHand dramatically reduces the costs from 82.92% to 99.99%. Nevertheless, this work demonstrates the security of ReHand by theoretically formal proofs.

Provable Secure Group Key Establishment Scheme for Fog Computing

“…The goal of these schemes is to reduce handover delays and ensure that handover schemes are secure, especially to support user's anonymity. Fan et al [24] designed a handover authentication protocol called ReHand based on symmetric cryptography. In Fan et al's scheme, the long-term key of each UE is shared with the base stations of the same region, and a region key is shared between eNB and HeNBs in the same region.…”

Is 5G Handover Secure and Private? A Survey

“…Similarly, Fan et al [96] proposed a region-based handover scheme for small cell networks. Quite similar to the aforementioned trust zone, the main idea of this scheme is to build a region containing one eNB and several Home Evolved Node Base Stations (HeNBs).…”

“…Many schemes [58], [59], [85], [86], [88], [90], [94], [96], [101]- [103], [105], [106], [116], [118], [120], [125] adopted pseudonym-based mechanism to achieve identity pri-vacy preservation. In order to prevent adversaries from identity tracing, the ME changes its pseudonym every time when it performs handover.…”

A Survey on the Security and the Evolution of Osmotic and Catalytic Computing for 5G Networks

“…The proposed mechanisms rely on the concept of reducing messages involved in the authentication procedure with the authentication server. The user anonymity in the handover is considered by Fan et al [73] in their ReHand scheme. Their scheme reduces the communication cost compared with the existing solutions.…”