Secure Roaming of Key Association Scheme Providing Perfect Forward Secrecy in IEEE 802.16

Abstract

To date, IEEE 802.16 WiMAX has been seen increasingly as a fairly promising technique for next wireless communication networks to provide broadband wireless access, to which has been paid more attention by more and more researchers. When it comes to communication schemes or protocols in wireless networks, security is worth being considered as a critical issue. Likewise, in IEEE 802.16, researchers proposed a lot of security schemes or protocols based on IEEE 802.16 standard. However, these proposed protocols still suffer from plenty of malicious attacks. In this paper, we describe and analyze the security issues of the authentication and key management protocols in WiMAX, which are very vulnerable to many attacks. Then we focus Xu, Matthews, and Huang proposed protocol, secure roaming of key association during handover. Although it settles the problem with re-launch the authentication and key management when an MSS roams into from one base station to the other base station, could not guarantee the forward secrecy and backward secrecy at all. So we may also propose a possible solution, secure roaming of key association scheme providing perfect forward secrecy, which adopts elliptic curve cryptography and offers faster computational efficiency than RSA public key algorithm.