Machine type communication (MTC) takes advantages of billions of devices being connected to each other in sensing our ambient environments. When a large number of MTC devices in a group attempt to access a radio link of LTE, congestions in the link may drop throughput of data and signaling traffic significantly. This paper is presented to enhance security overheads in the radio access network by utilizing group-based authentication. Comparing to related works the proposed protocol does not require a radical change in the incumbent security protocol. Further, the proposed protocol is confirmed by performance evaluations that it produces less computational and communication overheads than the current LTE-AKA.

The goal of 3GPP Long Term Evolution/System Architecture Evolution (LTE/SAE) is to move mobile cellular wireless technology into its fourth generation. One of the unique challenges of fourth-generation technology is how to close a security gap through which a single compromised or malicious device can jeopardize an entire mobile network because of the open nature of these networks. To meet this challenge, handover key management in the 3GPP LTE/SAE has been designed to revoke any compromised key(s) and as a consequence isolate corrupted network devices. This paper, however, identifies and details the vulnerability of this handover key management to what are called desynchronization attacks; such attacks jeopardize secure communication between users and mobile networks. Although periodic updates of the root key are an integral part of handover key management, our work here emphasizes how essential these updates are to minimizing the effect of desynchronization attacks that, as of now, cannot be effectively prevented. Our main contribution, however, is to explore how network operators can determine for themselves an optimal interval for updates that minimizes the signaling load they impose while protecting the security of user traffic. Our analytical and simulation studies demonstrate the impact of the key update interval on such performance criteria as network topology and user mobility.

Demand for the femtocell is largely credited to the surge in a more always best connected communication conscious public. 3GPP define new architecture and security requirement for Release 9 to deal with femtocell, Home eNode B referred as HeNB. In this paper, we analyze the HeNB security with respect to mutual authentication, access control, and secure key agreement. Our analysis pointed out that a number of security vulnerabilities have still not been addressed and solved by 3GPP technical specification. These include eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attack, compromising subscriber access list, and masquerading as valid HeNB. To the best of our knowledge, any related research studying HeNB security was not published before. Towards this end, this paper proposes an improved authentication and key agreement mechanism for HeNB which adapts proxy-signature and proxy-signed proxy-signature. Through our elaborate analysis, we conclude that the proposed not only prevents the various security threats but also accomplishes minimum distance from user-tolerable authentication delay.

The integrated core network architecture and various mobile subscriber behaviors can result in a significant increase of signaling loads inside the evolved packet core network proposed by 3GPP in Release 8. Consequently, an authentication signaling analysis can provide insights into reducing the authentication signaling loads and latency, satisfying the quality-of-experience. In this paper, we evaluate the signaling loads in the EPS architecture via analytical modeling based on the renewal process theory. The renewal process theory works well, irrespective of a specific random process (i.e. Poisson). This paper considers various subscribers patterns in terms of call arrival rate, mobility, subscribers' preference and operational policy. Numerical results are illustrated to show the interactions between the parameters and the performance metrics. The sensitivity of vertical handover performance and the effects of heavy-tail process are also discussed.