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ES-AKA: An Efficient and Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for UMTS Networks

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Abstract

The authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol of the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) was proposed to solve the vulnerabilities found in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) systems. The UMTS-AKA provides mutual authentication, but is still vulnerable to redirection attack, denial of service attack, and man-in-the-middle attack. Apart from various attacks possibilities, the UMTS-AKA has a problem of counter synchronization, generates huge overhead, and utilizes more bandwidth and message exchanges during the authentication. An intruder may apply these attacks to impersonate the network or mischarge the mobile users. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure AKA protocol namely ES-AKA to prevent the UMTS network against these problems and attacks. This protocol also solves the synchronization problem occurred between a mobile station MS and its home network HLR. The ES-AKA protocol generates lesser communication overhead as compared to UMTS-AKA, EXT-AKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, SKA-AKA, AP-AKA, X-AKA, EURASIP-AKA, Full-AKA, and U-AKA protocols. In addition, it also generates less computation overhead than the UMTS-AKA, EXT-AKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, S-AKA, Full-AKA, and U-AKA protocols. On an average, the ES-AKA protocol reduces 62 % of the bandwidth, which is the maximum reduction of the bandwidth by any AKA protocol referred in the paper. This protocol is also able to reduce 6 % of the messages exchanged (in terms of computations) during the authentication in comparison to UMTS-AKA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, State University of New York (SUNY), 119 Songdo, Moonhwa-ro, Yeonsu-Gu, Incheon, South Korea

    Neetesh Saxena & Jaya Thomas

  2. Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, New York, 11794, United States

    Neetesh Saxena & Jaya Thomas

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, South Ambazari Road, Nagpur, India

    Narendra S. Chaudhari

  4. Discipline of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, PACL Campus, 113/2-B, Opp. Veterinary College, Harniya Khedi, Mhow, Indore, 453441, MP, India

    Narendra S. Chaudhari

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  1. Neetesh Saxena
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Correspondence to Neetesh Saxena.

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Saxena, N., Thomas, J. & Chaudhari, N.S. ES-AKA: An Efficient and Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for UMTS Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 84, 1981–2012 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2551-7

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