Privacy-preserving authentication for military 5G networks

As 5G networks gain traction in defense applications, ensuring the privacy and integrity of the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol is critical. While 5G AKA improves upon previous generations by concealing subscriber identities, it remains vulnerable to replay-based synchronization and linkability threats under realistic adversary models. This paper provides a unified analysis of the standardized 5G AKA flow, identifying several vulnerabilities and highlighting how each exploits protocol behavior to compromise user privacy. To address these risks, we present five lightweight mitigation strategies. We demonstrate through prototype implementation and testing that these enhancements strengthen resilience against linkability attacks with minimal computational and signaling overhead. Among the solutions studied, those introducing a UE-generated nonce emerge as the most promising, effectively neutralizing the identified tracking and correlation attacks with negligible additional overhead. Integrating this extension as an optional feature to the standard 5G AKA protocol offers a backward-compatible, low-overhead path toward a more privacy-preserving authentication framework for both commercial and military 5G deployments.