Blockchain-based Authentication for 5G Networks

Fifth generation (5G) cellular network, is a promising network that provides user promising quality of services in various applications such as health, banking, education, etc. Security consideration is the most critical element facing the reliance upon this technology. Registration, authentication and key agreement protocols are considered the most important protocols in any cellular network, since the subscriber and the network trust each other and share a symmetric key. Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) developed security specifications for the user authentication with the provider. However, many researchers targeted these protocols and concluded that there are still some security issues and proposed authentication and key agreement protocols. On the other hand, blockchain is considered one of the emerging technologies that will have a great impact on our life in the coming days. Blockchain grants its security properties such as authenticity and integrity to various applications such as bitcoin, smart contracts, etc. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel, efficient and secure authentication and key agreement protocol for 5G networks using blockchain. Our security analysis illustrates that the proposed scheme is secure and withstands the known attacks; denial of service, distributed denial of service, man in the middle, hijacking and compromising attacks. Furthermore, our performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than the current scheme and also other schemes since it preserves the small battery properties of the user equipment and also preserves the bandwidth of the network.