Efficient Handover Authentication in Digital Twin Assisted Networks

In this paper, we consider digital twin assisted networks, wherein multiple virtual replicas are constructed for each user across different regions to collect their positional data and predict their future trajectory. These digital twins then utilize real-time location information to offer various location-based network services. When users roam to new areas, their digital twins require seamless authentication and migration. To this end, we design a lightweight handover authentication protocol based on cryptography to protect the handover process security of the users’ digital twins while providing seamless service migration. Specifically, by dividing the complex handover authentication process into two separate phases, i.e., pre-authentication and handover authentication, the proposed scheme can offload the time-consuming operations from users to digital twins deployed on the edge server. Thorough security analysis and extensive evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can ensure mutual authentication and defense against known attacks.