Visible to the public A Formal Analysis of 5G Authentication

TitleA Formal Analysis of 5G Authentication
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsBasin, David, Dreier, Jannik, Hirschi, Lucca, Radomirovic, Sa\v sa, Sasse, Ralf, Stettler, Vincent
Conference NameProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5693-0
Keywords5G standard, AKA protocol, Authentication protocols, Collaboration, composability, compositionality, formal analysis, policy-based governance, privacy, protocol verification, pubcrawl, symbolic verification
Abstract

Mobile communication networks connect much of the world's population. The security of users' calls, SMSs, and mobile data depends on the guarantees provided by the Authenticated Key Exchange protocols used. For the next-generation network (5G), the 3GPP group has standardized the 5G AKA protocol for this purpose. We provide the first comprehensive formal model of a protocol from the AKA family: 5G AKA. We also extract precise requirements from the 3GPP standards defining 5G and we identify missing security goals. Using the security protocol verification tool Tamarin, we conduct a full, systematic, security evaluation of the model with respect to the 5G security goals. Our automated analysis identifies the minimal security assumptions required for each security goal and we find that some critical security goals are not met, except under additional assumptions missing from the standard. Finally, we make explicit recommendations with provably secure fixes for the attacks and weaknesses we found.

URLhttps://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3243734.3243846
DOI10.1145/3243734.3243846
Citation Keybasin_formal_2018