A Novel Approach for Authentication Technique in Mobile Communications

Abstract

Authentication of mobile subscriber is a challenge of future researchers due to increasing security threats and attacks with the enhanced population of wireless traffic. 3G mobile communication system has been developed to speed up the data communication. In general the authentication technique in 2G mobile communication is solely dependent on checking the authenticity of MS (Mobile Station or Subscriber) by challenge/response mechanism. Here authenticity is one-way for which MSC (Mobile or Main Switching Center) checks the validity of MS. 3G mobile communication works on two different switching techniques. One is circuit switching for voice and low speed data communications. The other one is packet switching mainly for data communication, but can afford voice communication like VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), video telephony, multimedia service etc. Generally high speed data communication is established by packet switching process through PDSN (Packet Data Serving Node) servers. In circuit switching (3G network) authentication is mutual where both MS and MSC or network authenticate each other, but in packet switching only network (servers in PDSN) examines the authenticity of MS. In this paper, we enlighten different new approaches that can be effectively used as an authentication tool in 3G mobile communications.