Extending Open5GS for IIoT: Performance Evaluation of the EAP-AKA’ Integration for 5G Standalone Non-Public Networks

The growing demands of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) necessitate secure and flexible authentication in 5G Standalone Non-Public Network (SNPN). While the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) supports such scenarios, open-source 5G cores, such as Open5GS, lack support for EAP-based methods and rely solely on 5G-AKA. This work adds EAP-AKA’ support to Open5GS, enabling secure USIM-based authentication for SNPN. A virtualized testbed was used to compare EAP-AKA’ with standard 5G-AKA. Results show that EAP-AKA’ increases message size, latency, and memory usage due to EAP encapsulation and ECIES-based cryptographic operations. Despite the added overhead, EAP-AKA’ improves authentication flexibility. This enhancement makes Open5GS more suitable for private 5G deployments in industrial environments, aligning it with 3GPP standards for secure and scalable authentication.