Research On Authentication Method In Heterogeneous Wireless Network

In recent years, as the growing of the technology and the evolution of the network, various wireless networks are gradually moving towards integration of complementary when at the same time compete with each other. It is the trend of the future wireless networks that providing a unified mobility management system to integrate these wireless network in order to provide ubiquitous network access services to the mobile users all the time.It is a very complicated project to connect the heterogeneous wireless networks (HWN), and there still are lots of problems to be resolved, in which, the security is an important one. In HWN, when the mobile users roamed the outside network, they usually need to be authenticated by the visited network and access it by negotiation with session key. The process relies on the trust relationship between the visited network and mobile users, which is not promised to be established.In this paper, we mainly study on the switching authentication in HWN. Firstly, we analyzed the security threat and requirements in HWN, and introduced the characters, architecture and security authentication method of two wireless networks 3G and wireless LAN (WLAN). Secondly, convergence scheme and security authentication method in 3G-WLAN was introduced. By analyzing the EAP-AKA protocol applied in 3G-WLAN, we identified the security weakness and vulnerability, which may suffer being attacked possibly. Finally, according to the security weakness, we proposed an AAA broker proxy authentication scheme based on the diameter infrastructure, and verified the scheme formally by using security protocol verification tools, which supports the Dolev-Yao attacking model.