Synchronous Authentication Key Management Scheme for Inter-eNB Handover over LTE Networks

Handover process execution without active session termination is considered one of the most important attribute in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. Unfortunately, this service always is suffered from the growing of security threats. In the Inter-eNB handover, an attacker may exploit these threats to violate the user privacy and desynchronize the handover entities. Therefore, the authentication is the main challenge in such issue. This paper proposes a synchronous authentication scheme to enhance the security level of key management during Inter-eNB handover process in LTE networks. The security analysis proves that the proposed scheme is secure against the current security drawbacks with perfect backward/forward secrecy. Furthermore, the performance analysis in terms of operations cost of authentication and bandwidth overhead demonstrates that the proposed scheme achieves high level of security with desirable efficiency. Keywords—LTE network; X2 handover; horizontal and vertical key derivations; desynchronizing attack