Analysis of authentication and key establishment in inter-generational mobile telephony

TY - GEN

T1 - Analysis of authentication and key establishment in inter-generational mobile telephony

AU - Tang, Chunyu

AU - Naumann, David A.

AU - Wetzel, Susanne

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - Second (GSM), third (UMTS), and fourth-generation (LTE) mobile telephony protocols are all in active use, giving rise to a number of interoperation situations. Although the standards address roaming by specifying switching and mapping of established security context, there is not a comprehensive specification of which are the possible interoperation cases. Nor is there comprehensive specification of the procedures to establish security context (authentication and short-term keys) in the various interoperation scenarios. This paper systematically enumerates the cases, classifying them as allowed, disallowed, or uncertain with rationale based on detailed analysis of the specifications. We identify the authentication and key agreement procedure for each of the possible cases. We formally model these scenarios and analyze their security, in the symbolic model, using the tool Prove if. We find two scenarios that inherit a known false base station attack. We find an attack on the CMC message of another scenario.

AB - Second (GSM), third (UMTS), and fourth-generation (LTE) mobile telephony protocols are all in active use, giving rise to a number of interoperation situations. Although the standards address roaming by specifying switching and mapping of established security context, there is not a comprehensive specification of which are the possible interoperation cases. Nor is there comprehensive specification of the procedures to establish security context (authentication and short-term keys) in the various interoperation scenarios. This paper systematically enumerates the cases, classifying them as allowed, disallowed, or uncertain with rationale based on detailed analysis of the specifications. We identify the authentication and key agreement procedure for each of the possible cases. We formally model these scenarios and analyze their security, in the symbolic model, using the tool Prove if. We find two scenarios that inherit a known false base station attack. We find an attack on the CMC message of another scenario.

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84903973684

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84903973684#tab=citedBy

U2 - 10.1109/HPCC.and.EUC.2013.226

DO - 10.1109/HPCC.and.EUC.2013.226

M3 - Conference contribution

SN - 9780769550886

T3 - Proceedings - 2013 IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, HPCC 2013 and 2013 IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing, EUC 2013

SP - 1605

EP - 1614

BT - Proceedings - 2013 IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, HPCC 2013 and 2013 IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing, EUC 2013

PB - IEEE Computer Society

T2 - 15th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, HPCC 2013 and 11th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing, EUC 2013

Y2 - 13 November 2013 through 15 November 2013

ER -