Title: A symmetric polynomial-based mutual authentication protocol for GSM networks

Authors: Ali Fanian; Mehdi Berenjkoub; T. Aaron Gulliver

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

Abstract: GSM is the most popular standard for wireless cellular networks with 3 billion handsets in use worldwide. One of the critical components in the GSM architecture is the authentication protocol. The current protocol has several drawbacks such as one-way entity authentication, memory overhead in the VLR and bandwidth consumption between the HLR and VLR. Several solutions have been proposed to establish mutual entity authentication and to improve performance. However, they either cannot provide flaw-free bilateral entity authentication or impose more overhead in GSM networks. In this paper, we propose a novel mutual entity authentication based on symmetric polynomials. Each MS is allocated a share of the authentication polynomial during initial authentication. In subsequent authentication requests, the MS and VLR authenticate each other using this symmetric polynomial. The proposed solution not only provides secure bilateral authentication, but also decreases the memory overhead in the VLR and the required connection bandwidth.

Keywords: GSM networks; bilateral authentication; unilateral authentication; man-in-the-middle attacks; symmetric polynomials; mutual authentication protocols; wireless networks; mutual entity authentication; network security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2012.052530

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2012 Vol.7 No.3, pp.161 - 173

Accepted: 03 Jul 2012
Published online: 10 Mar 2013 *

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