A TNC Protocol for 3GPP-WLAN Integrated Environment

Abstract

The incorporation of The Third Generation (3G) networks with Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) is an inevitable outcome of mobile communication and wireless network development, and provides high quality services and anywhere-anytime connectivity to mobile users. To provide secure and trusted 3G-WLAN network, Extensible Authentication Protocol-Authentication and Key Agreement (EAP-AKA) is now used. However, EAP-AKA have several vulnerabilities, which can induce security threaten and lower efficiency of 3G-WLAN. Therefore, this paper analyzes vulnerabilities of EAP-AKA firstly, and proposes a new authentication and key agreement protocol based on certificateless public key cryptography in Trusted Network Connect (TNC) architecture. The proposed protocol combines D-H key exchange algorithm to overcome several vulnerabilities and provides strong security mutual-authentication between requestor and responder. Compared with other protocols based on public key cryptosystem with certificates, our protocol can also provide lightweight bandwidth consumption and high-level security.