City Research Online

Abstract

Since the radio medium can be accessed by anyone, authentication of users is a very important element of a mobile network. Nowadays, in GSM/GPRS a challenge response protocol is used to authenticate the user to the mobile network. Similarly, in third generation mobile systems [3] a challenge response protocol was chosen in such a way as to achieve maximum compatibility with the current GSM security architecture. Both authentication mechanisms use symmetric key cryptography because of the limited processing power of the mobile devices. However, recent research [6] has shown that asymmetric, or public, key cryptography can be enabled successfully in future mobile terminals. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive authentication and key agreement protocol (AAKA) for future mobile communication systems. The novelty of AAKA and its main advantage over other challenge response protocols is that can be adaptive to the mobile environment and use symmetric and/or public key cryptography for user and network authentication.

Publication Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information:	© 2006 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.
Publisher Keywords:	Authentication, GSM, UMTS, key agreement
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Computer Science > Software Reliability

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