No abstract

In Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is an authentication framework, not a specific authentication mechanism. EAP-AKA is one of the methods of EAP which uses the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) mechanism based on challenge-response mechanisms, EAP-AKA is used in the 3 rd generation mobile networks then modified and inherited to 4 th generation mobile networks (LTE) as Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement (EPS-AKA) mechanism. EPS-AKA vulnerabilities are disclosure of the user identity, Man in the Middle attack and Denial of Services (DoS) attacks so a robust authentication mechanism must replace EPS-AKA to avoid such attacks. In this paper, Modified Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement (MEPS-AKA) protocol based on Simple Password Exponential Key Exchange (SPEKE) is proposed to solve these problems. Scyther tool is used to verify the efficiency of the proposed protocol against the mentioned attacks. EPS-AKA and MEPS-AKA are simulated using C programming language to calculate the execution time for both algorithms.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the standard for high-speed wireless communication for mobile devices and data terminals. Although, the 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has specified some security mechanisms to insure the security of intra-MME handover, but there exists a few vulnerabilities compromising the security of the LTE entities. The most harmful vulnerability is the de-synchronization attack. This attack aims to compromise the new session keys using a false base station by desynchronizing the target eNodeB during the handover process. In this paper, a modification for the standard protocol is presented to overcome this attack. Also the paper investigates the performance of the modified protocol in terms of the handover phase's latencies according to the 3GPP technical specifications. Finally, the opensource framework LTE-Sim is used to provide complete performance evaluation for the modified protocol, by measuring the received packets average delays and the Packet Error Loss Ratio (PELR) of the transmitted packets, comparing with the 3GPP requirements.