Open Access

Preserving Privacy of User Identity Based on Pseudonym Variable in 5G

by Mamoon M. Saeed¹, Mohammad Kamrul Hasan^2,*, Rosilah Hassan², Rania Mokhtar³, Rashid A. Saeed^3,4, Elsadig Saeid¹, Manoj Gupta⁵

1 Electrical Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Alzaiem Alazahri University, Khartoum, Sudan
2 Center for Cyber Security, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan, Malaysia (UKM), 43600, Bangi, Malaysia
3 Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computers and Information Technology, Taif University, PO Box 11099, Taif, 21944, Saudi Arabia
4 Department of Electronics Engineering, College of Engineering, Sudan University of Science and Technology, Khartoum, Sudan
5 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, JECRC University, Jaipur, India

* Corresponding Author:Mohammad Kamrul Hasan. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 70(3), 5551-5568. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.017338

Received 27 January 2021; Accepted 19 May 2021; Issue published 11 October 2021

Abstract

The fifth generation (5G) system is the forthcoming generation of the mobile communication system. It has numerous additional features and offers an extensively high data rate, more capacity, and low latency. However, these features and applications have many problems and issues in terms of security, which has become a great challenge in the telecommunication industry. This paper aimed to propose a solution to preserve the user identity privacy in the 5G system that can identify permanent identity by using Variable Mobile Subscriber Identity, which randomly changes and does not use the permanent identity between the user equipment and home network. Through this mechanism, the user identity privacy would be secured and hidden. Moreover, it improves the synchronization between mobile users and home networks. Additionally, its compliance with the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) structure was adopted in the previous generations. It can be deployed efficiently in the preceding generations because the current architecture imposes minimal modifications on the network parties without changes in the authentication vector's message size. Moreover, the addition of any hardware to the AKA carries minor adjustments on the network parties. In this paper, the ProVerif is used to verify the proposed scheme.

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Citations