On Post-Quantum Perfect Forward Secrecy in 6G

The standardized Authentication and Key Agreement protocol for 5G networks (also known as 5G AKA) has several security and privacy vulnerabilities. For example, the 5G AKA does not undertake perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose a novel quantum-safe authentication and key agreement protocol for future generation of mobile communication networks (6G). Our protocol has several privacy and security properties, e.g., it is resistant against linkability attacks and it is quantum-safe. We use the Kyber algorithm, chosen by NIST to become a standard and NIST Round 4 candidate algorithms to analyze the performance of our protocol. The results for communication and computation costs show that utilizing our protocol is feasible in practice. We further prove the security of our protocol by utilizing the well-known formal verifier ProVerif.