Post-Quantum Secure Hybrid Methods for UE Primary Authentication in 6G with Forward Secrecy

Trustworthiness, privacy and resilience are expected to be essential requirements of 6G on top of various other conventional performance requirements such as data rate and latency. Primary authentication is a key procedure for initiating secure communication between User Equipment (UE) and Home Network (HN) in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). However, primary authentication mechanisms used in 5G are vulnerable against quantum machines, replay attacks, and rouge base-station. To protect against these threats, we propose beyond 5G and 6G primary authentication methods to adapt hybrid mechanisms which combines Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and existing asymmetric algorithm with Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) guarantee. We evaluate proposed methods using our in-house developed Simulator "WirelessPQCSim." Our proposed Hybrid mechanisms provide enhanced security without additional CPU overhead with respect to exiting 5G system. We also achieved up to 6.7x speed-up for PQC-based methods with respect to 5G system and provide low latency which is one of the KPI for 6G system.