Key management protocol in WIMAX revisited

Abstract

Without physical boundaries, a wireless network faces many more vulnerabilities than a wired network does. Compared to Wi-Fi, security has been included in the design of WiMAX systems at the very start. IEEE802.16 standard (WiMAX) provides a security sublayer in the MAC layer to address the privacy issues across the fixed BWA (Broadband Wireless Access). After the launch of this new standard, a number of security issues were reported in several articles. Ever since the beginning, work has been in progress for the neutralization of these identified threats. In this paper, we first overview the IEEE802.16 standard, especially the security sublayer, and then authorization protocol PKM in WiMAX has been analyzed. We found that PKM (Privacy and Key Management) is vulnerable to replay, DoS, Man-in-the middle attacks and we propose a new methodology to prevent the authorization protocol from such attacks. We also give a formal analysis of authentication protocol (PKMv2) and for the proposed protocol; we conclude that our proposition prevent the attacks like Denial of service (DOS), Man-in-the-middle and replay. The formal analysis has been conducted using a specialized model checker Scyther, which provides formal proofs of the security protocol. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.