Abstract-Wireless technologies such as the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), and the Third-Generation (3G) mobile communications system complement each other to support a variety of services suited for the home, urban, and global environments. As roaming users expect a seamless handover (HO) experience when switching from one wireless network to another, fast and secure HO operations must be supported by the networks. In this paper, we present and analyze five reauthentication protocols for HOs between WiMAX and WLANs by subscribers of networks conforming to the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) standards. Our proposed protocols achieve outstanding performance results compared to standard protocols in terms of reauthentication signaling traffic and reauthentication delay, while fulfilling essential HO security requirements such as the provision of mutual authentication and forward and backward secrecy.
SummaryInterworking third-generation (3G) mobile communications systems and wireless local area networks (WLANs) is advantageous for both service providers and end users. However, securing such interworking architectures is a challenging task. EAP-AKA is the security protocol adopted by 3GPP to achieve authentication in 3G-WLAN interworking architectures. This paper proposes enhancements to EAP-AKA to improve performance and security during re-authentication. A novel protocol named local fast re-authentication (LFR) is proposed to replace the reauthentication protocols in EAP-AKA. The EAP-AKA key hierarchy is restructured to suit the needs of LFR. Evaluations show that LFR is superior to the re-authentication protocols in EAP-AKA in terms of performance and security. LFR has been tested by the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) security verification tool and proved to be secure.
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