Towards adaptive security mechanisms in 3GPP EPS/LTE networks

Nowadays, network operators face the challenge to host millions of devices having various needs. With the traditional connectivity management in EPS/LTE accesses, security services such as confidentiality and integrity protection are designed to be activated in a systematic manner leading to significant signaling and processing cost. In this paper we are interested in looking at security implementation in EPS/LTE and evaluating the signaling load induced by security mechanisms in different situations. The aim of this study is to figure out how much signaling can be saved using an adaptive multi-level security scheme such as the one sketched-up in this paper. For this purpose, a novel quantitative analysis is carried out. The preliminary findings suggest that activating security mechanisms only when needed results in a significantly lower security-related signaling load.