Analyzing the mutual authenticated session key in IP multimedia server-client systems for 4G networks

This paper scrutinizes the authentication and key agreement protocol adopted by the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System to meet the standards of a fourth-generation network. Lately, communication of multimedia (CoM) has drawn the attention of researchers for the future of secure wireless mobile communication. However, the CoM has not had any defensive mechanism to fulfil the specifications of 3GPP and reduce the computation and communication overheads and susceptible attacks like redirection, man-in-the-middle, and denial of service attacks. In addition, this paper has thoroughly investigated some existing protocols from the literature for the identification of new challenges in server-client authentication. To probe the challenges of the existing schemes realistically, the multimedia client and multimedia server components (proxy, interrogating, serving, and home subscriber server) were physically deployed on the Linux platform to examine the specifications of 3GPP, vulnerable attacks, computation, and communication overheads. We observed that the examined existing schemes are not able to fulfill the above criteria. We thus propose addition of the mutual authenticated session key (MASK) to the physical environment of the multimedia server-client. To satisfy the 3GPP specifications, the protocol of MASK offers mutual authenticity to the multimedia server-client. Moreover, the feature of mutual authenticity reduces the computation and communication overheads of the multimedia server-client. Since the session keys are jointly shared between the multimedia server and client, the protocol of MASK can additionally provide privacy preservation and forward secrecy.