Improving the Security of LTE-R for High-Speed Railway: From the Access Authentication View
Yu Wang, Wenfang Zhang, Xiaomin Wang, Wei Guo, Muhammad Khurram Khan, Pingzhi Fan
Abstract
Security and efficiency are crucial considerations for Long Term Evolution for Railway (LTE-R) which bears real-time transmission of train control information for future high-speed railway. In this article, we first analyze the vulnerabilities of LTE-R access authentication protocol, and then propose a proxy signature based authentication scheme to enhance the security of LTE-R without sacrificing efficiency. The proposed scheme consists of three main security mechanisms: a novel Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem based Certificateless Proxy Signature (ECC-CLPS) designed for authentication security, a hash-based puzzle introduced to defend against denial of service (DoS) attack and a key pre-generation mechanism used to improve the efficiency of fast handover authentication. The security analysis and performance simulation show that our scheme has advantages over existing LTE-based authentication schemes in terms of security, functionality, computation and communication costs. Moreover, the authentication requirements for security and efficiency in different LTE-R communication scenarios are fully considered, which makes our scheme more suitable for the access authentication in the future LTE-R based high-speed railway.