Design and Simulation of a New Intelligent Authentication for Handover over 4G (LTE) Mobile Communication Network

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Dept. of Comm, Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transport University, Cairo, Egypt.

2 Dept. of Comm, Canadian International College, Cairo, Egypt.

Abstract

LTE has become the dominant mobile communication network as it provides higher data rate, higher level of security and more applicable services. The handover is a critical process as it needs to be rapid and accurate process. In the handover over the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard security protocol, the key management takes place between the source eNodeB and target eNodeB under the Mobility Management Entity (MME) via X2 interface. 3GPP has specified some security mechanisms to ensure the safety of handover key management, but still there exist some vulnerabilities compromising the security of the handover process, such as desynchronization attack. This paper proposed a new Lightweight Intelligent authentication protocol, which solves the desynchronization attack, solves Man in The Middle Attack, and achieves shorter setup time. This protocol solves the desynchronization attack and Man in The Middle
Attack by adding a Certificate Authority (CA), which generates a certificate for each eNB of the LTE network. In addition, the proposed protocol achieves shorter setup time by applying a parallel key management and handover instead of sequential key management and handover with each eNB. The proposed protocol assumes a new method of authentication of the User Equipment (UE) by using a Key Management Unit (KMU).The proposed protocol is securely analyzed. In addition, measuring the performance analysis in terms of the communication overhead, computations overhead and setup time by using Eclipse Real Time Operating System program.  Finally, the proposed protocol is compared with the Standard protocol and MRN related work.

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