UMTS security: system architecture and hardware implementation

Universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) has specified security mechanisms with extra features compared to the security mechanisms of previous mobile communication systems (GSM, DECT). A hardware implementation of the UMTS security mechanism is presented in this paper. The proposed VLSI system supports the Authentication and Key Agreement procedure (AKA), the data confidentiality procedure, and the integrity protection procedure. The AKA procedure is based on RIJNDAEL Block Cipher. An efficient RIJNDAEL architecture is proposed in order to minimize the usage of hardware resources. The proposed implementation performs the AKA procedure within 76 ms comparing with the 500 ms that UMTS specifies. The data confidentiality and the integrity protection is based on KASUMI Block Cipher. The proposed KASUMI architecture reduces the hardware resources and power consumption. It uses feedback logic and positive-negative edge-triggered pipeline in order to make the critical path shorter, without increasing the execution latency. The SBOXes that are used from RIJNDAEL and KASUMI block ciphers have been implemented with combinational logic as well as with ROM blocks. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.