Abstract
The 3\(^\mathrm{rd}\) Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) recently proposed a standard for 5G telecommunications, containing an identity protection scheme meant to address the long-outstanding privacy problem of permanent subscriber-identity disclosure. The proposal is essentially two disjoint phases: an identification phase, followed by an establishment of security context between mobile subscribers and their service providers via symmetric-key based authenticated key agreement. Currently, 3GPP proposes to protect the identification phase with a public-key based solution, and while the current proposal is secure against a classical adversary, the same would not be true of a quantum adversary. 5G specifications target very long-term deployment scenarios (well beyond the year 2030), therefore it is imperative that quantum-secure alternatives be part of the current specification. In this paper, we present such an alternative scheme for the problem of private identification protection. Our solution is compatible with the current 5G specifications, depending mostly on cryptographic primitives already specified in 5G, adding minimal performance overhead and requiring minor changes in existing message structures. Finally, we provide a detailed formal security analysis of our solution in a novel security framework.
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Notes
- 1.
The official 3GPP documentation uses the term “Identity Confidentiality” to refer to the privacy of user identity. We follow the 3GPP naming convention.
- 2.
Users can also be identified through other unique identifiers, for instance International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) which uniquely identifies the mobile equipment. However, it is only the IMSI/SUPI which is used for initial identification purposes.
- 3.
The 3GPP documentation uses the term “key generating function” for these algorithms, while these are technically key derivation functions.
- 4.
This first Step is numbered 0 because its not an exclusive part of the AKA but rather the identification phase.
- 5.
The null-scheme is used only if the UE is making an unauthenticated emergency session or if the HN has configured “null-scheme” to be used or if the HN has not provisioned the public key needed to generate SUCI.
- 6.
Note that HN will maintain a separate distinct value of \( SQNID _{{ HN }}\) for each \( UE \) in its database.
- 7.
Note that \(\mathtt {label}_{\mathtt {ps}}\) is a constant value indicating the protection scheme, and \(\mathtt {label}_{{ HN }}\) is a constant value identifying the \({ HN }\).
- 8.
Note that here we are using \(\subset \) to indicate substrings.
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Khan, H., Dowling, B., Martin, K.M. (2018). Identity Confidentiality in 5G Mobile Telephony Systems. In: Cremers, C., Lehmann, A. (eds) Security Standardisation Research. SSR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11322. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04762-7_7
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