Efficient and Security Enhanced Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol

Abstract

As people increasingly rely on mobile networks in modern society, mobile communication security is becoming more and more important. In the Long Term Evolution/System Architecture Evolution (LTE/SAE) architecture, the 3rd Generation Partnership (3GPP) team has also developed the improved Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement (EPS AKA) protocol based on the 3rd Generation Authentication and Key Agreement (3G AKA) protocol in order to provide mutual authentication and secure communication between the user and the network. Unfortunately, the EPS AKA also has several vulnerabilities such as sending the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) in plain text (which leads to disclosure of user identity and further causes location and tracing of the user, Mobility Management Entity (MME) attack), man-in-middle attack, etc. Hence, in this paper, we analyze the EPS AKA protocol and point out its deficiencies and then propose an Efficient and Security Enhanced Authentication and Key agreement (ESE-EPS AKA) protocol based on hybrid of Dynamic Pseudonym Mechanism (DPM) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) retaining the original framework and the infrastructure of the LTE network. Then, our evaluation proves that the proposed new ESE-EPS AKA protocol is relatively more efficient, secure and satisfies some of the security requirements such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication.