A USIM-Based Uniform Access Authentication Framework in Mobile Communication

Abstract

With the rapid development of the mobile communication and wireless access technologies, the interworking of heterogeneous networks turns into a trend and various wireless networks are getting connected with the mobile core networks through different measures. At present, in mobile communication, though access authentication methods of various access networks are different from each other, they are all based on the unique authentication algorithm in (U)SIM, which results in several drawbacks and cannot fulfill the requirements of the future mobile communications. The underlying reason is the authentication algorithm is not extensible and the authentication framework is not independent of the communication technologies. In order to solve this problem, we propose a uniform access authentication framework. Making use of the extensive authentication protocol EAP, we add a media-independent authentication layer in USIM which outputs the uniform keys after an authentication, and a key adaptation layer is designed in the terminals which transforms the output keys accordingly to meet the specific requirements of various communication modules. In such a method, USIM is extensible in authentication algorithms and the authentication framework is independent of the communication technologies. Our analysis indicates that the proposed scheme is of great advantages over the current one.