Performance of Authentication Protocols in LTE Environments

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is the next-generation network beyond 3G. Authentication service is one of the most essential services in LTE networks, which has significant effects on internet security. In this paper, we survey and compare three authentication protocols: Password Authentication Protocol, Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol, and Extensive Authentication Protocol-Transport Layer Security. We present our implementation approach for the LTE testbed. From the experimental results, we conclude that PAP and LEAP are not sufficiently secure due to their vulnerability to dictionary attacks, while EAP-TLS can provide robust security if the network users are not very concerned with the overhead. Our proposed LTE testbed is meaningful and can be used to test the efficiency of other protocols.