Analyses Authentication and KeyAgreement (AKA) Protocol for UMTS Mobile Networks (original) (raw)

A new authentication protocol for UMTS mobile networks

EURASIP Journal on wireless …, 2006

This paper analyzes the authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) mobile networks, where a new protocol is proposed. In our proposed protocol, the mobile station is responsible for generating of authentication token (AUTN) and random number (RAND). The home location register is responsible for comparison of response and expected response to take a decision. Therefore, the bottleneck at authentication center is avoided by reducing the number of messages between mobile and authentication center. The authentication time delay, call setup time, and signalling traffic are minimized in the proposed protocol. A fluid mobility model is used to investigate the performance of signalling traffic and load transaction messages between mobile database, such as home location register (HLR) and visitor location register (VLR) for both the current protocol and the proposed protocol. The simulation results show that the authentication delay and current load transaction messages between entities and bandwidth are minimized as compared to current protocol. Therefore, the performance and the authentication delay time have been improved significantly.

Analytical model for authentication transmission overhead between entities in mobile networks

Computer Communications, 2007

This paper analyses the authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for UMTS mobile networks. In this research the current authentication protocol has been enhanced by reducing the network traffic, signalling message between entities. Consequently the bottleneck at authentication centre is avoided. This is achieved by reducing the number of messages between mobile and authentication centre, then reducing the authentication times, and setup time as well as improving authentication efficiency as shown in analytical analysis and simulation results. In this paper dynamic length (L) for an array for authentication vector (AV) has been proposed. This requires designing a new technique to predict the numbers of records in AV in each authentication data request depending on the arrival rate of authentication events and residence time of the mobile station (MS) in VLR/SGSN. The analytical and simulation study have been carried out to explore the impact of dynamic length for authentication vector on the signalling traffic in mobile network. To validate the simulation results in this research work, the results have been compared with the analytical results and fill match has been achieved.

Enhancing UMTS Authentication and Key Agreement with Vector Combination

The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) represents an evolution in terms of capacity, data speeds and new service capabilities from second generation mobile networks. It also provides more secure wireless access security mechanisms. One of these mechanisms, the authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol, is designed to help a foreign network to authenticate a roaming mobile user through authentication vectors generated by the authentication center (AuC) in the user's home network. However, AKA has been criticized due to its introduction of sequence numbers and its vulnerabilities of redirection attacks and active attacks in corrupted networks. Moreover, since only the home network can generate authentication vectors to its subscribers, the AuC actually becomes the traffic bottleneck. This paper proposes an enhanced AKA based on vector combination (VC-AKA) to eliminate the above drawbacks. Through vector combination, a size n array of authentication vectors can...

ES-AKA: An Efficient and Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for UMTS Networks

The authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol of the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) was proposed to solve the vulnerabilities found in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) systems. The UMTS-AKA provides mutual authentication, but is still vulnerable to redirection attack, denial of service attack, and man-in-the-middle attack. Apart from various attacks possibilities, the UMTS-AKA has a problem of counter synchronization, generates huge overhead, and utilizes more bandwidth and message exchanges during the authentication. An intruder may apply these attacks to impersonate the network or mischarge the mobile users. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure AKA protocol namely ES-AKA to prevent the UMTS network against these problems and attacks. This protocol also solves the synchronization problem occurred between a mobile station MS and its home network HLR. The ES-AKA protocol generates lesser communication overhead as compared to UMTS-AKA, EXTAKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, SKA-AKA, AP-AKA, X-AKA, EURASIP-AKA, Full-AKA, and U-AKA protocols. In addition, it also generates less computation overhead than the UMTS-AKA, EXT-AKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, S-AKA, Full-AKA, and U-AKA protocols. On an average, the ES-AKA protocol reduces 62 % of the bandwidth, which is the maximum reduction of the bandwidth by any AKA protocol referred in the paper. This protocol is also able to reduce 6 % of the messages exchanged (in terms of computations) during the authentication in comparison to UMTS-AKA.

Secure-AKA: An Efficient AKA Protocol for UMTS Networks

Wireless Personal Communications, 2014

In this paper, we propose an improved and efficient authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol named "Secure-AKA" to prevent Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) network from various attacks like man-in-the-middle attack, redirection attack, replay attack, active attacks in the corrupted UMTS networks, and especially denial of service attack. This protocol completely eliminates the need of counter synchronization between a mobile station and its home network, and protects the actual identity of each user over the network by generating a temporary identity during the authentication. The Secure-AKA protocol generates minimum communication and computation overheads as compared to UMTS-AKA, S-AKA, AP-AKA, EURASIP-AKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, X-AKA, and EXT-AKA protocols. On an average, Secure-AKA protocol reduces 65 % of the bandwidth consumption during the authentication process in comparison to UMTS-AKA, which is the maximum reduction of bandwidth by any AKA protocol referred in the paper.

An Enhancement of Authentication Protocol and Key Agreement (AKA) For 3G Mobile Networks

2011

This paper proposes a secure authentication mechanism by integrating the public key with the hash-chaining technique. The propose protocol satisfies the security requirements of third generation (3G) mobile networks. Also provide the protection of the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) to ensure subscriber un-traceability, key refreshment periodically, strong key management and a new non-repudiation service in a simple and elegant way. The proposed protocol is more secure protocol than the other available authentication protocols. To avoid the complicated synchronization as in universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) the proposed protocol does not use sequence number (SEQ), the management of a hash chain is simple and elegant compared to that of SEQ. This proposed protocol is secure against network attacks, such as replay attacks, guessing attacks, and other attacks.

An efficient authentication protocol for mobile communications

Telecommunication Systems, 2010

In this paper, a new Global System of Mobile Communications (GSM) authentication protocol is proposed to improve some drawbacks of the current GSM authentication protocol for roaming users including: (a) communication overhead between VLR; (b) huge bandwidth consumption between VLR and HLR; (c) storage space overhead in VLR; (d) overloaded in HLR with authentication of mobile stations; and (e) not supporting bilateral authentication. The main contribution of this paper is that it does not only improve the drawbacks listed above but also fits the needs of roaming users. In addition, the proposed protocol does not change the existing architecture of GSM, and the robustness of the proposed protocol is the same as that of the original GSM, which is based on security algorithms A3, A5, and A8.

Formal analysis of a novel mutual authentication and key agreement protocol

Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2011

This research work analyzes the universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol, which suffers from the traffic bottleneck at home location register and authentication center (HLR/AuC). In addition, serving network has no capability to authenticate mobile station. To overcome these problems a new security scheme has been proposed which provides a more efficient and a secure authentication between mobile station and home networks, the proposed protocol called Efficient AKA (E-AKA). The E-AKA uses a temporary key to enable visitor location register and serving network (VLR/SN) to authenticate mobile station (MS) without intervention of HLR/AuC. To analyze and validate the security of the proposed protocol, the BAN (Burrows, Abadi and Needham) logic is used. The results show that the E-AKA protocol is more robust than the current AKA protocol.