Title: An effective AKA protocol for UMTS

Authors: Hsia-Hung Ou; Iuon-Chang Lin; Min-Shiang Hwang

Addresses: Graduate Institute of International Sports Affairs, National Taiwan Sport University, No. 250, Wenhua 1st Rd., Guishan Township, Taoyuan County 333, Taiwan, ROC ' Department of Management Information Systems, National Chung Hsing University, 250 Kuo Kuang Road, 402 Taichung, Taiwan, ROC ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Asia University, 500 Lioufeng Road, 413 Taichung, Taiwan, ROC

Abstract: Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) is the most popular third-generation mobile phone system at present and the UMTS AKA is authentication and key agreement protocol. There are some weaknesses in the existing UMTS AKA protocol, such as synchronisation question, storage overhead, insecurity with leakiness authentication vector and weakness in mutual authentications. In this paper, we use the concept of proxy key to design a more secure and more efficient UMTS AKA protocol. Our protocol can not only resist the above-mentioned drawback of the original UMTS AKA protocol on the security, but also improve the performance of UMTS AKA protocol, including the computational overhead, storage overhead and communication overhead.

Keywords: UMTS; AKA; authentication; key agreement; mobile phones; cell phones; mobile telecommunications; proxy key; synchronisation; storage overhead; insecurity; mutual authentication; security; mobile communications.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2012.048139

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2012 Vol.10 No.4, pp.427 - 448

Published online: 23 Jul 2012 *

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