Faster and Safer: Seamless Group-Based Cross-Layer Authentication and Key Agreement for 6G

The upcoming 6G networks will support an unprecedented number of connected devices, thus greatly expanding the attack surfaces. Access authentication helps mitigate these threats, but may introduce prohibitive costs due to massive connections operating in high-frequency bands on resource-constrained devices. This motivates the proposal of SeaAKA, a novel protocol designed to achieve efficient authentication in 6G networks. The SeaAKA protocol implements seamless group-based cross-layer authentication through a novel voting mechanism that coordinates physical-layer authentication (using lightweight approaches) with upper-layer verification (employing Shamir’s secret sharing). This integration reduces computational and communication overhead during repeated authentication cycles while maintaining high accuracy. Security analysis using BAN logic confirms SeaAKA’s resilience against replay attacks along with data integrity/privacy preservation. Evaluations demonstrate SeaAKA’s superior efficiency over existing methods, reducing communication overhead from 4.244 to 0.0006 ms and computational overhead from 2,432 to 512 bits.