Achieve Secure Handover Session Key Management via Mobile Relay in LTE-Advanced Networks

TLDR: A secure handover session key management scheme via mobile relay in LTE-A networks that can successfully establish session keys between the on-board UEs and their connected DeNB, achieving backward and forward key separations, and resisting against the collusion between the MRN and the DeNB as the same time.

Abstract: Internet of Things is expanding the network by integrating huge amount of surrounding objects which requires the secure and reliable transmission of the high volume data generation, and the mobile relay technique is one of the efficient ways to meet the on-board data explosion in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks. However, the practice of the mobile relay will pose potential threats to the information security during the handover process. Therefore, to address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a secure handover session key management scheme via mobile relay in LTE-A networks. Specifically, in the proposed scheme, to achieve forward and backward key separations, the session key shared between the on-board user equipment (UE) and the connected donor evolved node B (DeNB) is first generated by the on-board UE and then securely distributed to the DeNB. Furthermore, to reduce the communication overhead and the computational complexity, a novel proxy re-encryption technique is employed, where the session keys initially encrypted with the public key of the mobility management entity (MME) will be re-encrypted by a mobile relay node (MRN), so that other DeNBs can later decrypt the session keys with their own private keys while without the direct involvement of the MME. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can successfully establish session keys between the on-board UEs and their connected DeNB, achieving backward and forward key separations, and resisting against the collusion between the MRN and the DeNB as the same time. In addition, performance evaluations via extensive simulations are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.