Ghazli Abdelkader, Hadj Said Naima, Ali Pacha Adda, Journal of Information Processing Systems Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 152-173, Feb. 2017  

10.3745/JIPS.03.0064
Keywords: authentication, GSM, Location Update, Mobility Management, Paging, Security
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Abstract

Mobile phones are the most common communication devices in history. For this reason, the number of mobile subscribers will increase dramatically in the future. Therefore, the determining the location of a mobile station will become more and more difficult. The mobile station must be authenticated to inform the network of its current location even when the user switches it on or when its location is changed. The most basic weakness in the GSM authentication protocol is the unilateral authentication process where the customer is verified by the system, yet the system is not confirmed by the customer. This creates numerous security issues, including powerlessness against man-in-the-middle attacks, vast bandwidth consumption between VLR and HLR, storage space overhead in VLR, and computation costs in VLR and HLR. In this paper, we propose a secure authentication mechanism based new mobility management method to improve the location management in the GSM network, which suffers from a lot off drawbacks, such as transmission cost and database overload. Numerical analysis is done for both conventional and modified versions and compared together. The numerical results show that our protocol scheme is more secure and that it reduces mobility management costs the most in the GSM network.

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