5G communications proposed significant improvements over 4G in terms of efficiency and security. Among these novelties, the 5G network slicing seems to have a prominent role: deploy multiple virtual network slices, each providing a different service with different needs and features. Like this, a Slice Operator (SO) ruling a specific slice may want to offer a service for users meeting some requirements. It is of paramount importance to provide a robust authentication protocol, able to ensure that users meet the requirements, providing at the same time a privacy-by-design architecture. This makes even more sense having a growing density of Internet of Things (IoT) devices exchanging private information over the network. In this paper, we improve the 5G network slicing authentication using a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) scheme: granting users full control over their data. We introduce an approach to allow a user to prove his right to access a specific service without leaking any information about him. Such an approach is SANS, a protocol that provides nonlinkable protection for any issued information, preventing an SO or an eavesdropper from tracking users’ activity and relating it to their real identities. Furthermore, our protocol is scalable and can be taken as a framework for improving related technologies in similar scenarios, like authentication in the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) or other wireless networks and services. Such features can be achieved using cryptographic primitives called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). Upon implementing our solution using a state-of-the-art ZKP library and performing several experiments, we provide benchmarks demonstrating that our approach is affordable in speed and memory consumption.

中文翻译：

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SANS：网络切片的自主权身份验证

5G通信在效率和安全性方面提出了相对于4G的重大改进。在这些新颖性中，5G网络切片似乎发挥了重要作用：部署多个虚拟网络切片，每个虚拟切片提供具有不同需求和功能的不同服务。这样，裁定特定分片的分片运算符（SO）可能希望为满足某些要求的用户提供服务。提供可靠的身份验证协议，确保用户满足要求并同时提供按设计的隐私体系结构是至关重要的。随着物联网（IoT）设备密度的不断增长，通过网络交换私人信息变得更加有意义。在本文中，我们使用自主权身份（SSI）方案改进了5G网络切片身份验证：授予用户对其数据的完全控制权。我们引入一种方法，使用户可以证明自己有权访问特定服务而不会泄漏任何有关他的信息。这种方法是SANS，该协议为任何发布的信息提供不可链接的保护，从而防止SO或窃听者跟踪用户的活动并将其与真实身份相关联。此外，我们的协议具有可扩展性，可以作为在类似情况下改进相关技术的框架，例如5G无线电接入网络（RAN）或其他无线网络和服务中的身份验证。可以使用称为零知识证明（ZKP）的密码原语来实现此类功能。在使用最新的ZKP库实施我们的解决方案并进行了几次实验后，