Security Scheme for LTE Initial Attach

Abstract

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a fourth-generation mobile communication technology implemented throughout the world. There is still, however, an exposed vulnerability with regard to the identification parameters such as IMSI and RNTI, as they are transmitted in plain text during the initial attach procedure in the access to the LTE network. The vulnerability has existed since the initial release of the LTE Standards, and is still present in Release 12. To prevent a leak of the identification parameters during the initial attach process and a possible third party attack, the relevant parameters should be encrypted. This paper proposes a security scheme to safely transmit identification parameters in different cases of the initial attach. The proposed security scheme solves the exposed vulnerability by encrypting the parameters in transmission. Using an OPNET simulator, it is shown that the average rate of delay and processing ratio are efficient in comparison to the existing process.

Privacy-Enhancing Security Protocol in LTE Initial Attack

“…In addition, P-GW allocates an IP address to the user terminal and serves as the mobile anchoring point in the handover between 3GPP and non-3GPP. Lastly, HSS manages the users' personal profiles [8,[10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…Centering around the LTE security layer, the LTE network carries out mutual authentication based on EPS-AKA. The LTE security is divided broadly into three processes: UE-HSS mutual authentication process, UE-MME NAS security setup process and UE-eNB ASsecurity setup process [6,7,9,14,[22][23][24]. LTE security process is shown in Figure 3.…”

“…IMSI refers to the unique ID requested from each user when the net administrator registers the user to the service, and this value refers to the unique number of identifications saved in the USIM in the user device [14].…”