Sec-E2E: End-to-End Communication Security in LS-HetNets Based on Blockchain

Large-Scale Heterogeneous Networks (LS-HetNets) integrate different types of networks enabled by various technologies into a global coverage network to offer seamless networking. Securing End-to-End (E2E) communication in LS-HetNets is an effective way to gain high communication security and user trust across multiple network domains. However, most of existing research on E2E security suffers from several severe drawbacks, such as single point of failures, identity privacy leakage, and poor generality. The literature still lacks a universal E2E communication security framework for LS-HetNets. In this paper, we propose Sec-E2E, a decentralized framework that uses blockchain to provide E2E communication security in LS-HetNets. It comprises several components that work in harmony to ensure secure and efficient E2E communications. Sec-E2E includes a blockchain-enabled protocol for User Equipment (UE) registration and key management, a privacy-preserving mutual authentication protocol that allows Serving Networks (SNs) and UEs to authenticate with each other quickly, and a secure session key generation and distribution scheme empowered with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Security and performance evaluation demonstrates that Sec-E2E not only meets desired design goals of security and privacy, but also performs with higher efficiency compared with existing representative works.