A Survey of Public Key Infrastructure-Based Security for Mobile Communication Systems

Abstract

Abstract:Mobile communication security techniques are employed to guard the communication between the network entities. Mobile communication cellular systems have become one of the most important communication systems in recent times and are used by millions of people around the world. Since the 1990s, considerable efforts have been taken to improve both the communication and security features of the mobile communications systems. However, these improvements divide the mobile communications field into different generations according to the communication and security techniques such as A3, A5 and A8 algorithms for 2G-GSM cellular system, 3G-authentication and key agreement (AKA), evolved packet system-authentication and key agreement (EPS-AKA), and long term evolution-authentication and key agreement (LTE-AKA) algorithms for 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) systems. Furthermore, these generations have many vulnerabilities, and huge security work is involved to solve such problems. Some of them are in the field of the public key cryptography (PKC) which requires a high computational cost and more network flexibility to be achieved. As such, the public key infrastructure (PKI) is more compatible with the modern generations due to the superior communications features. This paper surveys the latest proposed works on the security of GSM, CDMA, and LTE cellular systems using PKI. Firstly, we present the security issues for each generation of mobile communication systems, then we study and analyze the latest proposed schemes and give some comparisons. Finally, we introduce some new directions for the future scope. This paper classifies the mobile communication security schemes according to the techniques used for each cellular system and covers some of the PKI-based security techniques such as authentication, key agreement, and privacy preserving.

Optimizing a Password Hashing Function with Hardware-Accelerated Symmetric Encryption

“…Sakalauskas et al improved upon an asymmetric cipher based on the matrix power function (see [18]) to avoid a successful discrete logarithm attack against the original version. Ramadan et al published a survey of public key infrastructure (PKI)-based security for mobile systems (see [19]) covering aspects such as authentication, key agreement, and privacy. Qiao et al described a black-box traceable ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE, see [20,21]) that is scalable and efficient and, therefore, better suited for cryptographic cloud storage.…”

A New Quantum Encryption Scheme

“…This is briefly the impersonation problem. Since this is a core attack in a public key infrastructure, many applications are in danger of being attacked [2]. We therefore need a…”

Efficient and Security Enhanced Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol

“…In this part, we evaluate the efficiency of ESE-EPS AKA protocol compared with the original EPS AKA and SEPS AKA in [9] which is the most efficient scheme from a survey of the most recent and important works on AKA techniques based on PKI in [2] as mentioned above. Bandwidth consumption and computational cost as the two comparison criteria will be discussed, respectively.…”

“…Nevertheless, the 3G security construction primarily aims at improving the system flexibility and adaptability to new challenges instead of providing complete security [2]. There are still some flaws in the security protocol such as easiness of the subscriber's identity leakage, the operation difficulty of sequence number etc.…”

“…However, the results of some related research works show that the LTE security architecture still has several security deficiencies, especially in AKA. Although many researches have been done, such as PKI based scheme, most of their efforts were concentrated on confidentiality and authentication requirements [2]. In terms of the User Equipment with limited computing resources, the efficiency of the security scheme is very critical for the sake of practical application while achieving the security requirements.…”