EKMP: An enhanced key management protocol for IEEE 802.16m

Recently, IEEE 802.16m was submitted to the ITU and acknowledged as the candidate technology of the IMT-advanced standardization. In this paper, we point out several security issues, such as key agreement blocking and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, of the key management protocol in IEEE 802.16m. To address the found security issues, we propose an enhanced key management protocol, named as EKMP, which extends the pairwise master key and adds the integrity protection to all key agreement messages. EKMP can not only provide advanced relay station access but also avoid key agreement blocking and DoS attacks. In particular, our scheme is provably secure in the Canetti-Krawczyk model. Furthermore, our theoretical analysis shows that EKMP is much more efficient in terms of communication overhead and memory requirement.