GROSS: One-time Secret Sharing Can Make Group-based Authentication More Efficient
Yuandong Wu, Guoshun Nan, Jianlong Ban, Hanqing Mu, He Fang, Qimei Cui, Xiaofeng Tao, Pengxuan Mao, Tianyuan Yang · 2024
Group-based authentication allows users within a single domain and group to access networks without repeating an individual authentication instance, greatly reducing the energy consumption of low-resource mobile devices in IoT and M2M communications. Nevertheless, in the case of the upcoming 6G massive communications with an exponentially larger number of connections, the computation and communication overhead of existing approaches on mobile devices are still significant. To this end, we propose GROSS, a novel GRoup-based authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol that uses a One-time Secure Secret-sharing mechanism for more efficient authentication over massive wireless communications. Specifically, we employ a lightweight cryptographic operation for the above one-time secret sharing. The proposed GROSS significantly reduces both computation and communication overhead by consistently maintaining the validity of credentials for group-based authentication, thus enabling efficient verification of device legitimacy within a group. We also implement a simulation platform on JAVA for energy consumption evaluations for massive wireless communications. Our platform facilitates the flexible configuration of various energy components for authentication and supports up to million-level wireless connections. We conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of our proposed GROSS.