Using the Liberty Alliance Architecture to Secure IP-level Handovers

This paper presents a novel authentication and authorization architecture for mobile terminals while performing an IP-level handover. The proposed architecture is based on the liberty alliance single sign-on architectural framework. Using the foundation provided by this architecture, we also present a protocol to enable these security functions during the handover process. Later, we present the results of a performance comparison of the proposed protocol against the current specified mechanism for 3 GPP2-WLAN interworking. We then perform a detailed threat analysis to show that the proposed solution is secure. The solution proposed in this paper is a scalable practical solution to authenticate and authorize handovers in future generation mobile networks, leveraging on the liberty alliance architecture that operator may have deployed for authenticating service requests within a Liberty Federation