3G Networks A solution to Improved Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol

With the development of mobile communication network, the requirements of mobile users for data services are higher and higher, which makes data service become more diversiform and various service providers appear on after the other. As a result, data services increasingly become the main service in mobile network. The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is one of the new ‘third generation’ (3G) mobile cellular communication systems being developed within the framework defined by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) known as IMT-20001.UMTS aims to provide a broadband, packet-based service for transmitting video, text, digitized voice, and multimedia at data rates of up to 2 Mbps while remaining cost effective. The AKA procedure is the essence of authenticating a user to the network and vice versa. AKA procedures in UMTS have increased security compared with GSM. However, during its development some security problems emerged. Although the authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol solve some, it still has some flaws such as lacking complete authentication and interworking and so on. In order to those problem preferable, aiming at the security threaten for services based on mobile network and the problems with the existing AKA, the paper analyzes the existing Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol, and points out the security flaws among it and possible methods of attack. For the security flaws, an improved AKA protocol is proposed. In the end, the paper analyzes the improved AKA protocol. Keywords—UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems), International Telecommunications Union (ITU); Access Points; IMT-20001; 3G, HTTP, FTP; TELNET protocols, IEEE 802.1x protocol with EAP-TTLS; Mutual Authentication; AKA;