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Secure-AKA: An Efficient AKA Protocol for UMTS Networks

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS), India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Discipline of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, India

    Neetesh Saxena & Narendra S. Chaudhari

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Visvesvarya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India

    Narendra S. Chaudhari

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  1. Neetesh Saxena
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  2. Narendra S. Chaudhari
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Correspondence to Neetesh Saxena.

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Saxena, N., Chaudhari, N.S. Secure-AKA: An Efficient AKA Protocol for UMTS Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 78, 1345–1373 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-014-1821-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-014-1821-0

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