A Lightweight Post-Quantum Authentication Framework for 5G Base Station Bootstrapping

Abstract

The absence of authenticated bootstrapping between User Equipments (UEs) and Base Stations (BSs) in 5G leaves System Information Block (SIB) broadcasts unprotected, enabling fake BS attacks, man-in-the-middle interception, and spoofed emergency alerts. Prior efforts such as Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based certificate chains, token-based schemes, and identity-based signatures either impose overhead exceeding 5G's strict packet-size constraints or lack post-quantum (PQ) security. Direct NIST-PQC integration is also infeasible; current standards, such as ML-DSA requires 34 fragmented SIB1 packets and up to 5,282\,ms end-to-end delay, and FN-DSA still requires 13 fragments and up to 1,920\,ms. We propose EMULSION, a symmetric chained publicly verifiable authentication framework for 5G/6G BS broadcast authentication. EMULSION is the first framework to exploit native 5G architectural features: fixed SIB transmission windows, millisecond-level time synchronization, and eSIM/USIM credential management to achieve genuine PQ security at symmetric-key efficiency. It uses a timed stream loss-tolerant authentication with HMAC chain anchored by a compact PQ signature~(MAYO) applied once per epoch, fitting authentication within a single packet with no fragmentation and eliminating certificate transmission entirely. Unlike prior schemes, EMULSION extends to the full SIB family (SIB1-SIB21) at no additional per-broadcast cost, demonstrated over the air on SIB1. Evaluated on a real over-the-air 5G testbed, EMULSION achieves 33x lower end-to-end delay and 31x less communication overhead than ML-DSA, and 12x lower delay and 5.4x less overhead than FN-DSA. We formally prove the security of EMULSION and open-source its implementation for public testing and adaptation.