Mobile Privacy in Wireless Networks-Revisited

With the widespread use of mobile devices, the privacy of mobile location information becomes an important issue. In this paper, we present the requirements on protecting mobile privacy in wireless networks, and identify the privacy weakness of the third generation partnership project - authentication and key agreement (3GPP-AKA) by showing a practical attack to it. We then propose a scheme that meets these requirements, and this scheme does not introduce security vulnerability to the underlying authentication scheme. Another feature of the proposed scheme is that on each use of wireless channel, it uses a one-time alias to conceal the real identity of the mobile station with respect to both eavesdroppers and visited (honest or false) location registers. Moreover, the proposed scheme achieves this goal of identity concealment without sacrificing authentication efficiency.