A Lightweight Authentication Protocol for 5G Cellular Network Connected Drones

Siyu Chen, Shujie Cui, Joseph Liu

Abstract: Drones are being diversely used in various areas due to their low price. Most of the use cases demand a secure and reliable wireless communication infrastructure to ensure the quality of service. Such demand boosts the deployment of drones in 5G cellular network. The ground base station (BS) is the main component associated with drones in the 5G cellular network. However, the BS in 5G currently broadcasts the system information message without authentication protection. This poses serious security concerns as the system information message will be used to build connection between the BS and cellular devices. Particularly, adversaries can masquerade as BSs, connect drones, and obtain the data captured by them. Although some attacks have been prevented due to the recent enhancements for 5G cellular protocols, the root vulnerability for the bootstrap phase between drones and the BS still existed and not fixed yet. In this work, we consider a scenario where drones are used in a sport venue to capture the match and 5G cellular network is used to disseminate the live stream. To protect drones from fake BSs, we adopt and optimise the authentication protocol proposed by Singla et al. in [26]. Basically, we modify its architecture by deploying aerial balloon drone BSs over the sport venues to provide more reliable communication service. Moreover, we optimise the verification process in order to reduce the computation overhead on drones. We implemented a prototype of the protocol and evaluated its performance. The experiment results show our authentication protocol is practical to be adopted.