DTHA: A Digital Twin-Assisted Handover Authentication Scheme for 5G and Beyond

With the rapid development and extensive deployment of the fifth-generation wireless system (5G), it has achieved ubiquitous high-speed connectivity and improved overall communication performance. Additionally, as one of the promising technologies for integration beyond 5G, digital twin in cyberspace can interact with the core network, transmit essential information, and further enhance the wireless communication quality of the corresponding mobile device (MD). However, the utilization of millimeter-wave, terahertz band, and ultra-dense network technologies presents urgent challenges for MD in 5G and beyond, particularly in terms of frequent handover authentication with target base stations during faster mobility, which can cause connection interruption and incur malicious attacks. To address such challenges in 5G and beyond, in this paper, we propose a secure and efficient handover authentication scheme by utilizing digital twin. Acting as an intelligent intermediate, the authorized digital twin can handle computations and assist the corresponding MD in performing secure mutual authentication and key negotiation in advance before attaching the target base stations in both intra-domain and inter-domain scenarios. In addition, we provide the formal verification based on BAN logic, RoR model, and ProVerif, and informal analysis to demonstrate that the proposed scheme can offer diverse security functionality. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme outperforms most related schemes in terms of signaling, computation, and communication overheads.