A survey of public key infrastructure-based security for mobile communication systems

Abstract

Mobile communication security techniques are employed to guard the communication between the network entities. Mobile communication cellular systems have become one of the most important communication systems in recent times and are used by millions of people around the world. Since the 1990s, considerable efforts have been taken to improve both the communication and security features of the mobile communications systems. However, these improvements divide the mobile communications field into different generations according to the communication and security techniques such as A3, A5 and A8 algorithms for 2G-GSM cellular system, 3G-authentication and key agreement (AKA), evolved packet system-authentication and key agreement (EPS-AKA), and long term evolution-authentication and key agreement (LTE-AKA) algorithms for 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) systems. Furthermore, these generations have many vulnerabilities, and huge security work is involved to solve such problems. Some of them are in the field of the public key cryptography (PKC) which requires a high computational cost and more network flexibility to be achieved. As such, the public key infrastructure (PKI) is more compatible with the modern generations due to the superior communications features. This paper surveys the latest proposed works on the security of GSM, CDMA, and LTE cellular systems using PKI. Firstly, we present the security issues for each generation of mobile communication systems, then we study and analyze the latest proposed schemes and give some comparisons. Finally, we introduce some new directions for the future scope. This paper classifies the mobile communication security schemes according to the techniques used for each cellular system and covers some of the PKI-based security techniques such as authentication, key agreement, and privacy preserving.