Authentication Vectors Research Articles

Performance Evaluation of Public Key-Based Authentication in Future Mobile Communication Systems

While mobile hosts are evolving into full-IP enabled devices, there is a greater demand to provide a more flexible, reconfigurable, and scalable security mechanism in mobile communication systems beyond 3G (B3G). Work has already begun on such an all-IP end-to-end solution, commonly referred to as 4G systems. Fully fledged integration between heterogeneous networks, such as 2.5G, UMTS, WLAN, Bluetooth, and the Internet, demands fully compatible, time-tested, and reliable mechanisms to depend on. SSL protocol has proved its effectiveness in the wired Internet and it will probably be the most promising candidate for future wireless environments. In this paper, we discuss existing problems related to authentication and key agreement (AKA) procedures, such as compromised authentication vectors attacks, as they appear in current 2/2.5G/3G mobile communication systems, and propose how SSL, combined with public key infrastructure (PKI) elements, can be used to overcome these vulnerabilities. In this B3G environment, we perceive authentication as a service, which has to be performed at the higher protocol layers irrespective of the underlying network technology. Furthermore, we analyze the effectiveness of such a solution, based on measurements of a prototype implementation. Performance measurements indicate that SSL-based authentication can be possible in terms of service time in future wireless systems, while it can simultaneously provide both the necessary flexibility to network operators and a high level of confidence to end users.

Reducing authentication signaling traffic in third-generation mobile network

In the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), authentication functions are utilized to identify and authenticate a mobile station (MS) and validate the service request type to ensure that the user is authorized to use the particular network services. The authenticating parties are the authentication center (AuC) in the home network and the MS. In the UMTS, the serving general packet radio service support node (SGSN) accesses the AuC to obtain the authentication data, and delegates the AuC to perform mutual authentication with the MS. Since the cost for accessing AuC is expensive, the SGSN may obtain an array of authentication vectors (AVs) at a time so that the number of accesses can be reduced. On the other hand, if the size K of the AV array is large, the AV array transmission from the AuC to the SGSN may be expensive. Thus, it is desirable to select an appropriate K value to minimize the authentication network signaling cost. We propose an analytic model to investigate the impact of K on the network signaling traffic, which is validated by simulation experiments. Then, we propose an automatic K-selection mechanism that dynamically selects the size of the AV array to reduce the network signaling cost. Our study indicates that the automatic K-selection mechanism effectively identifies appropriate size of the authentication vector array.