An improved authentication and security scheme for LTE/LTE-A networks

Long term evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced networks support highly developed authentication and encryption mechanisms. However, these systems still suffer from various security problems such as replay attack, impersonation attack, known key attack, eavesdropping attack and so on. To mitigate these security weaknesses, an improved authentication and security scheme has been proposed for LTE/LTE-A networks. The proposed scheme employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), Elliptic Curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) and Salsa20 algorithm to improve end to end security and provide faster data transmission for 4G environment. The proposed scheme uses several powerful encryption techniques and also provides proper mutual authentication between User Equipment (UE) and Message Management Entity (MME). The performance of the proposed system has been compared with LTE-A and existing systems in terms of several security attributes and performance parameters. The comparative results show that the proposed scheme outperforms LTE-A as well as other existing schemes.