Authentication Protocols

Design of 5G AKA and Related Blocks

The crypto-primitive operations as provided in the 5G AKA has been implemented on the network of XBee devices. The following steps are included in the design

  1. One XBee along with a Raspberry Pi plays the role of the UE and it is loaded with all the pre-shared data to execute the 5G AKA

  2. One Xbee device that is connected to a computing device plays the role of both the home network. For the demonstration on the testbed, we do not consider the presence of the serving network in order to simplify the internal forwarding operations within the core network.

  3. The two XBee devices are set to operate in a bidirectional mode, wherein the challenge response strategy are implemented with several rounds owing to limited payload size in the packet structure. All the hash functions and the crypto-primitives as suggested by the 3GPP consortium is used in our testbed.

  4. Once the channel-response is successfully implemented between the two XBee devices, the UE device uses the derived key and transmits a message in the encrypted format to the core network, Subsequently the XBee device at the core network applies the decryption algorithm and displays the reconstructed image. In the proof of concept, we display the two images to prove that the secret key derived by the 5G AKA protocol was identical at the two ends.


Transactions between the UE and the core network when executing the 5G AKA protocol.

Related Publications:


  1. S.V. Sriraam, Suraj Sajeev, Rohit Joshi, Amogh Vithalkar, Manish Bansal, and J. Harshan, ``Implementation of 5G Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol on Xbee Networks," (Demo Paper) in the Proc. of COMSNETS 2020, Bangalore, India