PA-AKA: Privacy-Aware and Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Long Term Evolution (LTE)

Abstract

Several authentication schemes had been proposed for LTE to ensure confidentiality between the authorised users and the network. Most of these schemes could not preserve users’ privacy especially during the initial connection, although, few that are able to preserve subscribers’ identities completely left out Mobile Management Entity (MME) during International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) exchange. The inherent isolation of MME makes it impossible for MME to link pseudonym with identity in the subsequent connection. In this work an improved privacy aware authentication scheme is proposed, which does not only preserve the subscribers’ privacy during initial connection but allows MME to generate and map subscriber pseudonym with its identity in order to use pseudonym for subsequent connections. Thus, reduces computational overheads by reducing number of authentication operations performed by MME. A key-cluster based matrix approach was adopted at the Home Subscriber Server (HSS) to speed up the identification of subscribers. General Terms Mobile communication, security, LTE