Security Study Of The Third Generation Mobile Communication System (3G)

The security of the third generation mobile system is built on the basis of the security of the second generation mobile system, by adopting the secure characteristic that have been proved essential and strengthened of the GSM and other second generation mobile system, and rectifing the disadvantage of the second generation mobile system.In the third generation mobile system(3G), the mutual authentication between the user and the network had been presented. The network uses the dynamic bidirectional authentication way to authenticate the user. And the user uses the dynamic unidirectional authentication way to authenticate the network. Specially, the dynamic unidirectional authentication is the important security feature of the third generation mobile system varied to the second generation.The functions of f0,f1,f1*,f2,f3,f4,f5,f5* are used in the authentication and key agreement protocol, designed by using the kernel function.The authentication of user to network and the authentication of network to user can been analyzed using the BAN logic. It proved that there is still secure vulnerability in the third generation mobile system.In the third generation mobile system(3G), the keystream block is applied in the cipher function, and message authentication code is used to authenticate the data integrity of a signalling message. The cipher algorithm f8 and the integrity algorithm f9 are also designed by using the kernel fuction.Meanwhile, in order to avoiding that the permanent user identity (IMSI) of a user is delivered used the plaintext, the user is normally identified by a temporary identity by which he is known by the visited serving network.In the process of the second generation mobile system to the third generation mobile system, the coexistence of 2G and 3G will be appeared. In the different enviroment, the different security context should be performed.