Secure-AKA: An efficient AKA protocol for UMTS networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an improved and efficient authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol named "Secure-AKA" to prevent Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) network from various attacks like man-in-the-middle attack, redirection attack, replay attack, active attacks in the corrupted UMTS networks, and especially denial of service attack. This protocol completely eliminates the need of counter synchronization between a mobile station and its home network, and protects the actual identity of each user over the network by generating a temporary identity during the authentication. The Secure-AKA protocol generates minimum communication and computation overheads as compared to UMTS-AKA, S-AKA, AP-AKA, EURASIP-AKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, X-AKA, and EXT-AKA protocols. On an average, Secure-AKA protocol reduces 65 % of the bandwidth consumption during the authentication process in comparison to UMTS-AKA, which is the maximum reduction of bandwidth by any AKA protocol referred in the paper. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.