Yuandong Wu;Guoshun Nan;Xiaosu Xue;Huici Wu;Xiaofeng Tao
{"title":"Faster and Safer: Seamless Group-Based Cross-Layer Authentication and Key Agreement for 6G","authors":"Yuandong Wu;Guoshun Nan;Xiaosu Xue;Huici Wu;Xiaofeng Tao","doi":"10.1109/LCOMM.2025.3558927","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The upcoming 6G networks will support an unprecedented number of connected devices, thus greatly expanding the attack surfaces. Access authentication helps mitigate these threats, but may introduce prohibitive costs due to massive connections operating in high-frequency bands on resource-constrained devices. This motivates the proposal of SeaAKA, a novel protocol designed to achieve efficient authentication in 6G networks. The SeaAKA protocol implements seamless group-based cross-layer authentication through a novel voting mechanism that coordinates physical-layer authentication (using lightweight approaches) with upper-layer verification (employing Shamir’s secret sharing). This integration reduces computational and communication overhead during repeated authentication cycles while maintaining high accuracy. Security analysis using BAN logic confirms SeaAKA’s resilience against replay attacks along with data integrity/privacy preservation. Evaluations demonstrate SeaAKA’s superior efficiency over existing methods, reducing communication overhead from 4.244 to 0.0006 ms and computational overhead from 2,432 to 512 bits.","PeriodicalId":13197,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Communications Letters","volume":"29 6","pages":"1270-1274"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7000,"publicationDate":"2025-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"IEEE Communications Letters","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10955399/","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"TELECOMMUNICATIONS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The upcoming 6G networks will support an unprecedented number of connected devices, thus greatly expanding the attack surfaces. Access authentication helps mitigate these threats, but may introduce prohibitive costs due to massive connections operating in high-frequency bands on resource-constrained devices. This motivates the proposal of SeaAKA, a novel protocol designed to achieve efficient authentication in 6G networks. The SeaAKA protocol implements seamless group-based cross-layer authentication through a novel voting mechanism that coordinates physical-layer authentication (using lightweight approaches) with upper-layer verification (employing Shamir’s secret sharing). This integration reduces computational and communication overhead during repeated authentication cycles while maintaining high accuracy. Security analysis using BAN logic confirms SeaAKA’s resilience against replay attacks along with data integrity/privacy preservation. Evaluations demonstrate SeaAKA’s superior efficiency over existing methods, reducing communication overhead from 4.244 to 0.0006 ms and computational overhead from 2,432 to 512 bits.
期刊介绍:
The IEEE Communications Letters publishes short papers in a rapid publication cycle on advances in the state-of-the-art of communication over different media and channels including wire, underground, waveguide, optical fiber, and storage channels. Both theoretical contributions (including new techniques, concepts, and analyses) and practical contributions (including system experiments and prototypes, and new applications) are encouraged. This journal focuses on the physical layer and the link layer of communication systems.