Improving security level of LTE authentication and key agreement procedure
Fang−Yie Leu, Ilsun You, Yi‐Li Huang, Kangbin Yim, Cheng-Ru Dai · 2012
In recent years, LTE (Long Term Evolution) has been one of the mainstreams of current wireless communication systems. But when its HSS authenticates UEs, the random number RAND generated by HSS for creating other keys during its delivery from HSS to UE is unencrypted. Also, many parameters are generated by invoking a function with only one input key, thus very easily to be cracked. So in this paper, we propose an improved approach in which the Diffie-Hellman algorithm is employed to solve the exposure problem of RAND in the authentication process, and an Pair key mechanism is deployed when creating other parameters, i.e., parameters are generated by invoking a function with at least two input keys. The purpose is increasing the security levels of all generated parameters so as to make LTE more secure than before.