Kerberos Based Authentication Protocol with Improved Identity Protection in 3G Network

Wireless mobile communication imposes certain security risks due its underlying medium - airwave; in spite of its popularity. Different authentication protocols have been devised to strengthen the security for wireless communication. The authentication and key agreement (AKA) adapted by 3G networks is one of the widely appreciated protocols. However, even such protocol is vulnerable to threats like false base station attack and user identity theft under certain conditions. In this paper, we propose an authentication protocol for 3G network to overcome such threats by adopting the strong features of Kerberos based on tickets for rigorous mutual authentication and deploying a secret token between Mobile Station and Home Location Register for identity protection. The results show that under almost same operational cost, the proposed protocol can provide better security in terms of mutual authentication and identity protection.