SEACE: Security enhanced and computationally efficient AKA protocol for UMTS networks

Abstract

The Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) was proposed to avoid the weakness observed in the applications of the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) system. The UMTS authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol was the first protocol proposed to authenticate the communication entities in the UMTS network. The protocol fulfills the security demands such as mutual authentication, integrity and confidentiality. However, the existing UMTS-AKA protocol is susceptible to network vulnerabilities that leads to impersonation, denial of service, man in the middle and identity catching attack on the UMTS network. In view of these congenital vulnerabilities of UMTS-AKA, several AKA protocols were proposed by the researchers but these protocols fail to overcome all the security weakness. Moreover, none of the existing UMTS-AKA protocol overcome the single key exposure problem. To overcome these problems, we introduced the security enhanced and computationally efficient (SEACE) protocol for UMTS networks. The proposed protocol preserves the privacy of the MS, resolves the single key exposure problem and avoids all the identified attacks from the communication network. The security analysis of the SEACE-AKA protocol is carried out using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. The analysis shows that the protocol achieves security goals and secure against various known attacks. The performance analysis of the proposed protocol with existing AKA protocols shows that the SEACE-AKA protocol generates less overhead and fulfills all security requirements of the UMTS network.