User-to-User Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for LTE Cellular System

Abstract

Long Term Evolution LTE is the first technology that provides exclusively packet-switched data and modifies the security architecture of the 2G and 3G systems. The LTE security architecture offers confidentiality, access control, a kind of obscurity and mutual authentication. However, numerous types of attacks can be encountered during the mutual authentication process which is a challenge-response based technique. Therefore, a high secure public key algorithm can be implemented to improve the network security services. As the network operator is often considered as not being a highly trusted party and can thus face threats, the communications ends are the only secure parties to provide such security features. This paper pro- poses a secure mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for LTE cellular system with user-to-user security. The network side in this scheme operates as a proxy and non-trusted party to provide the security architecture with more exibility and reliability. This is achieved by using designated verifier proxy signature and key agreement protocol based bilinear pairing with some changes in both security algorithms and LTE security architecture within the LTE standardization. Our security and performance analysis demonstrated that the proposed scheme is more secure compared to the basic authentication and key agreements schemes.