DIAM: Diversified Identity Authentication Mechanism for 5G Multi-Service System

The future fifth-generation (5G) mobile communications system has already become a focus around the world. A large number of late-model services and applications including high definition visual communication, internet of vehicles, multimedia interaction, mobile industry automation, and etc, will be added to 5G network platform in the future. Different application services have different security requirements. However, the current user authentication for services and applications: Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) suggested by the 3GPP committee, is only a unitary authentication model, which is unable to meet the diversified security requirements of differentiated services. In this paper, we present a new diversified identity management as well as a flexible and composable three-factor authentication mechanism for different applications in 5G multi-service systems. The proposed scheme can provide four identity authentication methods for different security levels by easily splitting or assembling the proposed three-factor authentication mechanism. Without a design of several different authentication protocols, our proposed scheme can improve the efficiency, service of quality and reduce the complexity of the entire 5G multi-service system. Performance analysis results show that our proposed scheme can ensure the security with ideal efficiency.