Performance and security enhanced authentication and key agreement protocol for SAE/LTE network

• We exhaustively discuss the security threats of LTE access network.
• The scheme boosts the security level and improves performance of the network.
• We contribute to the methods of security protocols verification.
• The bandwidth consumption of exchange of authentication vectors is reduced by 79%.
• The computational, communication and storage overheads are significantly reduced.

In recent years, Long Term Evolution has been one of the promising technologies of current wireless communication systems. Quality of service and data rate contribute for the robustness of the field. These two factors are the sum up of transmission rate, security delay, delay variation and some other communication factors. Despite its high data rate and quality of service, Long Term Evolution has some drawbacks as far as the security of this technology is concerned. Particularly, there are some security holes in authenticating users for access in the domain of Access Network. For instance, when User Equipment requests for attachment, the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) is sent over network without security protection, hence privacy does not hold. In addition, many parameters are generated by invoking a function with only one input key by which compromising this key results in the whole failure of the system security. So as to mitigate these and some other huge security problems, the researchers, propose an improved approach without adding extra cost so that it can be implemented within the same environment as the existing security system (Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key agreement). As one of the performance enhancements, fetching authentication vectors from foreign network is enabled instead of fetching from home network, which significantly reduces the authentication delay and message overhead. Generally, the purpose is to boost the security level and performance of the protocol keeping the architecture of the system as similar as the conventional security system. These has been exhaustively analyzed and verified under network as well as security verification and simulation tools.

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