A Novel Group-oriented Handover Authentication Scheme in MEC-Enabled 5G Networks

With the rapid development of 5G, ultra-dense base station deployment will result in frequent handovers during user movement, increasing authentication delay. Moreover, a large number of users competing for a limited number of wireless channels will increase the probability of signaling collisions and cause network congestion. In this paper, based on the 5G network integrated by mobile edge computing (MEC) and software defined network (SDN), we propose an anonymous handover authentication scheme which supports multi-user access. Particularly, it provides lightweight user grouping and internal group authentication. In addition, by utilizing the aggregation message authentication code with detection function (AMAD) technique, multiple users can be authenticated simultaneously to reduce the number of signaling, and the identity list corresponding to the malicious MAC can be accurately identified and output, which can effectively resist to DoS attack. The security analysis proves that the scheme can provide robust security protection, and it is suitable for intra-domain handover and inter-domain handover. Compared with the existing group-based handover authentication schemes, the proposed scheme has moderate computational and communication overhead while its functions are superior to other schemes.