NS-AKA: An Improved and Efficient AKA Protocol for 3G (UMTS) Networks

In this paper, we propose an improved and efficient AKA protocol named “NS-AKA” to prevent the 3G UMTS networks from various attacks like man-in-the-middle attack, redirection attack, replay attack and active attacks in the corrupted UMTS networks. This protocol completely eliminates the need of synchronization between a mobile station and its home network, and protects the actual identity of each user in the networks, (i.e., IMSI) by generating a temporary identity for each user during the authentication. The NS-AKA protocol generates minimum communication and computation overheads compared to UMTS-AKA, S-AKA, AP-AKA, and EURASIP-AKA protocols. On an average the NS-AKA protocol reduces 67% of the bandwidth consumption during the authentication process as compare to UMTS-AKA, which is the maximum reduction of bandwidth by any AKA protocol referred in the paper. KeywordsUMTS, authentication, identity, overhead