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An effective approach to solving large communication overhead issue and strengthening the securities of AKA protocols
Author(s) -
Chien HungYu
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
international journal of communication systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1099-1131
pISSN - 1074-5351
DOI - 10.1002/dac.3381
Subject(s) - computer science , session key , computer network , umts frequency bands , forward secrecy , computer security , overhead (engineering) , symmetric key algorithm , authentication (law) , key (lock) , encryption , public key cryptography , operating system
Summary Authentication and key agreement (AKA) is a challenge‐response‐like security protocol that uses symmetric‐key cryptography to establish authenticated keys between 2 parties. Its application in the third‐generation mobile system universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) is called UMTS‐AKA, and the version applied in the fourth‐generation mobile communication system long‐term evolution (LTE) is called LTE‐AKA. Both UMTS‐AKA and LTE‐AKA share the same weakness: the network operators need to maintain a large space of authentication vectors for visiting stations, and the transmission of the vectors causes lots of overhead. This weakness will be amplified when there are billions of devices accessing the network in the Internet‐of‐things scenarios. In addition, these schemes provide only key distribution (not key agreement) and cannot provide session key forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose a range‐bound key assignment technique to tackle the challenges. The proposed scheme drastically reduces the communication overhead and greatly strengthens the security robustness. The securities are analyzed and are verified using the AVISPA toolset.