A Journey on WiMAX and its Security Issues

Security has become a primary concern in order to provide protected communication in Wireless environment. We know the basic concept of communication is sent the information from source node to destination node but in my view the communication is not sent the information but the amount of secure information which is sent from source node to destination node. The much anticipated technology for wireless broadband access, the WiMAX (Wireless Interoperability for Microwave Access) is finally starting to be available in the market with the aim to provide high data rates and provide interoperability of vendor devices at the same time. In this report we give an overview on the different performance evaluations that have been conducted on WiMAX systems and show the current capabilities and future trends in the WiMAX technology. As a promising broadband wireless technology, WiMAX has many salient advantages over such as: high data rates, quality of service, scalability, security, and mobility. Many sophisticated authentication and encryption techniques have been embedded into WiMAX but it still exposes to various attacks in. This report is a survey of security vulnerabilities found in WiMAX network. Vulnerabilities and threats associated with both layers in WiMAX (Physical and MAC layers). Keywords— WiMAX, Security Threats, Physical Layer, MAC Layer, Security Model, Towerstream, Authentication