A modified PKM environment for the security enhancement of IEEE 802.16e

IEEE 802.16 standard developed Privacy Key Management (PKM) security protocol for WiMAX. However, it still suffers from various attacks such as forgery attack, replay attack, Denial of Service (DoS) attack and eavesdropping attack. To mitigate these attacks, a modified PKM environment has been developed for the security enhancement of IEEE 802.16e. This system integrates multiple techniques like Random Number Generator (RNG), Rivest, Shamir and Adelman (RSA), Diffie-Hellman (DH) algorithm, Data Connection Core (DCC) and Salsa20 stream cipher to improve the end to end security of the WiMAX environment. The random numbers have been used as the inputs to the Diffie-Hellman Public Key Distribution System (DH-PKDS) to provide the public keys and common secret keys to it. The DCC contains RSA triple keys, which prevents the system from different attacks. Employment of RSA and DH algorithm in the proposed system leads to powerful data connection for authentication and enhanced key exchange flow respectively. The presence of TEK 3 way handshake in the TEK exchanges process prevents the system from different attacks. Stream cipher Salsa20 makes the system more secure and faster during data transmission process. The proposed system has been compared with standard WiMAX and existing work with respect to different security attributes. Moreover, the performance of the proposed system has been compared with Mutual Authentication with Dynamic Keys (MAWDK) in terms of key generation time, encryption and decryption time. Finally, the computational cost, total computational time and time complexity of the proposed system has been compared with existing systems.