The private 5G-and-beyond networks have the ability to fulfill the high data rate, low latency, and massive connectivity requirements of industrial IoT (IIoT) automation. As a result, the slice selection requests arriving at the control plane functions (CPFs) of the private 5G-and-beyond networks will increase. The network has to scale up its resources to improve the response time for slice selection requests. The scaling up of resources will lead to an increase in operational expenditure (OPEX). We propose a novel approach to the slice selection method in private 5G-and-beyond networks for industrial IoT that improves response time for slice selection requests and reduces OPEX for the networks. The response time of our proposed method (protocol) for$u$IIoT devices is approximately$\frac{1}{u}$times that of the traditional slice selection protocol, and the number of instances of CPFs required for the proposed protocol is also lesser than that of the slice selection protocol in 5Gs networks.

G networks can offer network slices customized according to the demands of the services to enhance the quality of their users’ experience. The time for selecting an appropriate network slice to facilitate traffic flow between users and services by the core network functions in 5G networks is crucial for services such as emergency service and ultra-reliable low latency services. Therefore, we propose a distributed slice selection architecture for 5G and beyond networks to reduce the waiting time for starting services for users. The proposed architecture distributes slice selection function (SSF) to the edge of the network. The networks have to ensure stealthy slice selection attack (S3 attack) free operation, as moving the SSF to the edge increases attack surface. Attackers can launch S3 attack by manipulating the slice selection decisions of SSFs distributed in the network edge. The S3 attacker intentionally maps service requests from users to inappropriate network slices to damage cloud radio access network utilization and the quality of experience of users. In this article, we also present a countermeasure to tackle the S3 attack using a novel protocol called VACCINE ( v erifi a ble priva c y-preserving proto c ol for sl i ce selectio n in 5G and beyond n e tworks). VACCINE also ensures privacy-preserving slice selection by the SSFs to prevent traffic analysis attacks. We prove the chosen-ciphertext attack security strength of VACCINE and also compare the computational cost of VACCINE with other related protocols.

Microwave communication through the fat tissue in the human body enables a new channel for wearable devices to communicate with each other. The wearable devices can communicate to the external world through a powerful device in their network called central control unit (CU); for example, a smartphone. Some wearable devices may be out of the range of the CU temporarily due to body movements or permanently due to low signal strength, in a fat channel communication network. Such devices can connect to the CU with the help of their neighbor device in the same network. In this paper, we propose a protocol to ensure secure indirect authentication and key establishment between the out-of-range device and the CU in a fat channel communication network, via an untrusted intermediate device in the network. The proposed protocol is lightweight and resistant to denial-of-sleep attacks on the intermediate device. We analyze the security and the computation overhead of the proposed protocol.

In the softwarized fifth generation (5G) networks, authentication protocols are deployed by both the mobile network operators and the third-party service providers to enable secure slice formation at the network side and user validation at the service provider side, respectively. However, the usage of static key-based authentication protocols in 5G networks gives rise to two major problems: (i) network slice topology learning attack during the formation of slice and (ii) exposure of users’ service access behavior to the third-party service providers and device-to-device communication peers. In this article, we propose group anonymous (i) privacy preserving mutual authentication (PPMA) and (ii) privacy preserving one-way authentication (PPOA) protocols to address the aforementioned problems, respectively. We also prove the security of the PPMA and PPOA protocols against the chosen ciphertext attack in the random oracle model. The PPMA and PPOA protocols are implemented using the JPBC library and the computation overhead is measured. For 1024 bits discrete logarithm security, the computation overhead of the PPMA and PPOA protocols is respectively 48.54 and 68.65 percent lower than an existing privacy preserving authentication protocol on an Intel processor. The PPMA and PPOA protocols are generic and can be applied in peer-to-peer authentication scenarios where group anonymity and privacy preservation are considered.

Slicing of a 5G network by creating virtualized instances of network functions facilitates the support of different service types with varying requirements. The management and orchestration layer identifies the components in the virtualization infrastructure to form an end-to-end slice for an intended service type. The key security challenges for the softwarized 5G networks are, (i) ensuring availability of a centralized controller/orchestrator, (ii) association between legitimate network slice components, and (iii) network slice isolation. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel implicit mutual authentication and key establishment with group anonymity protocol using proxy re-encryption on elliptic curve. The protocol provides (i) controller independent distributed association between components of a network slice, (ii) implicit authentication between network slice components to allow secure association, (iii) secure key establishment between component pairs for secure slice isolation, and (iv) service group anonymity. The proposed protocol's robustness is validated with necessary security analysis. The computation and bandwidth overheads of the proposed protocol are compared with that of the certificate based protocol, and our proposed protocol has 9.52% less computation overhead and 13.64% less bandwidth overhead for Type A1 pairing.