A Secure Authentication Protocol with Performance Enhancements for 4G LTE/LTE-A Wireless Networks

Abstract

Long Term Revolution (LTE) is the most common 4th generation cellular networks thanks to its high data transmission rate and wide coverage. However, LTE networks have many security vulnerabilities in terms of network architecture, access and handover procedure, media and machine type communications. This paper focuses on enhancing the performance and security functions of the access procedure in LTE/LTE-Advance wireless networks by a proposal, which can not only provide security functions to the LTE access procedure, but also improve the performance of the process. The protocol has been systematically verified by using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool to demonstrate its ability to prevent various types of malicious attacks. The security functions and performance of the proposed protocol have also been compared to some existing solutions to show its advantages.