Evaluation of Security Attacks on UMTS Authentication Mechanism

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.

2006 Proceedings of the First Mobile Computing and Wireless Communication International Conference, 2006

This paper analyses the authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for UMTS mobile networks, where a new authentication protocol which is able to reduce the network traffic and signaling message between entities, and consequently the bottleneck at authentication centre is avoided, this is achieved by reducing the number of messages between mobile and authentication centre, and then reducing the authentication times and setup time as well as improving authentication efficiency as shown in numerical analysis and simulation results. In this paper we propose dynamic length (L) for an array for authentication vector (AV). This required designing new technique to predict the numbers of records in AV in each authentication data request depending on the to arrival rate of authentication events and residence time of MS in VLR/SGSN. The proposed AKA with dynamic L for A V is compared with the current AKA with fixed length for A V.

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.

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.

IEEE Wireless Communications, 2004

The first generation of cellular mobile communications systems contained few if any security measures to protect the system operator and users. The second generation generally did a lot better, and contained entity authentication and confidentiality protection. Although this was a major improvement, security protection in the second generation left a lot to be desired. With the advent of 3G mobile systems a serious effort has been made to create a consistent security architecture based on the threats and risks a 3G system faces.

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.

Mobile communications have known an impressive development in recent years, and are characterized by a trend towards broadband communications and extremely diverse applications. For some of these applications, such as financial transactions, shopping or online social networks, security is of extreme importance. This paper presents a survey of the most important and most vulnerable part of the security of wireless networks: network access. The study includes the protocols used by UMTS and LTE standards as well as some of the latest protocols proposed in the literature.

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...

2006 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics, 2006

This paper presents an in-depth analysis and evaluation of the security of UMTS. Four classes of attacks and threats are discussed in detail. Thereafter, the available security mechanism and services of UMTS are reviewed and evaluated. It is found that most of the potential attacks and threats can be thwarted by the available security services and mechanisms of UMTS.

2002

Security is a primary concern in mobile communication systems. Wireless access is inherently less secure, and mobility implies higher security risks than static operation. The security framework for 3G mobile systems is considered, and its principles and security requirements are discussed. Furthermore, the security features that are currently being standardized in 3GPP, as well as the emerging 3G-security architecture are elaborated. The focus is on the various mechanisms and protocols, which are employed to provide security at different levels, and on their effect on network operation.