EC-AKA2 a revolutionary AKA protocol

Abstract

Security is increasingly demanding in mobile communication, especially LTE, and the incremental value of transmitted assets over wireless networks pushes risk way above acceptable thresholds. Decision is continuously moving towards the user side, while the need for seamless security is becoming a must. Under all these requirements, 3GPP failed to propose a new Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol that solves the vulnerabilities found in the current AKA, and implement user preferences in network selection, thus 3GPP failed to meet LTE's current security needs. This paper proposes a complete AKA protocol that solve four different LTE-AKA weaknesses. The proposed protocol is backward compatible, needs no additional investment and achieves great QoS performance.

Security analysis of LTE/SAE networks over E-UTRAN

“…7) EC-AKA2: It was proposed by Jacques Bou Abdou et al to solve the problem of IMSI catching and mobile user tracking in which its purpose is to make this solution capable of fortifying vulnerabilities outside EC-AKA's scope of interest. In fact, the new solution differs from EC-AKA in parameters and restrictions [10].…”

SEPS-AKA : A Secure Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for LTE - A Networks

“…In [8], Abdo et al define four security weaknesses in the original LTE AKA protocol: IMSI catching, tracking user temporary identity due to linkability and security network authentication. In addition, the authors propose two countermeasures to use in order to solve these problems: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and pseudonyms based approaches.…”

“…However, comparing with the SEPS-AKA scheme, where an UE is identified mathematically by its IMSI, as mentioned in equations (1), (7), (8), and (9), and the mathematical computation were based on the RSA scheme. The original and the EC-AKA schemes, the transmission of the IMSI gains the probability to different previous attack.…”

“…The evaluation of the performance of the SEPS-AKA scheme is compared to HSK-AKA [7], EC-AKA [8], SP-AKA [9] and the original EPS-AKA. Therefore, two comparison criteria's will be discussed; bandwidth consumption and computation overhead.…”

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

“…Abdo et al [39] defined four security weaknesses in the original LTE AKA protocol: IMSI catching, tracking user temporary identity due to linkability and security network authentication. In addition, the authors proposed two countermeasures to use in order to solve these problems: PKI and pseudonyms based methods.…”