An adoption of Kerberos to 3G network for mutual authentication: Challenges and evaluations

Despite its current popularity, mobile communication can carry significant security risks. The authentication and key agreement (AKA) adapted by the third generation (3G) networks aims to strengthen wireless security. This standard provides mutual authentication between the user and the mobile network as well as cipher and integrity key management. However, the AKA is vulnerable to the false base station attack because of a lack of vigorous mutual authentication and a high authentication delay problem. In this paper we present a novel authentication and key agreement mechanism, referred to as the Kerberos-AKA, in order to address such problems in the 3G network. The Kerberos-AKA takes advantages of a ticket in Kerberos. Our analytical results show that the Kerberos-AKA can reduce the authentication delay significantly.