A privacy threat in 4th generation mobile telephony and its countermeasure

Abstract

Mobile telephony device is widely used these days. Protecting subscribers privacy is crucial and can be achieved by evading linkability of subscribers by malicious third parties. In this paper, we analyze the privacy-related security properties of 4th generation mobile telephony, especially LTE. We suggest an attack model which makes it possible to trace a victim’s mobile device so that the attacker can know the presence of the victim’s device in a specific area. Tracking subscribers’ location by unauthorized third parties may violate the privacy of subscribers. To solve this problem, we propose a modified authentication protocol in LTE to preserve location privacy of the device. Considering security level and efficiency, we build our scheme to have low computational overhead and strong secrecy. Also we prove that the proposed scheme satisfies unlinkability property using the automatic verification tool ProVerif. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.