Analysis of Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) Protocols in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Access Network

Mobile communications systems have evolved considerably in recent years. Fourth generation networks (4G) allow to expand cellular coverage while improving accessibility to Internet services. Network access security includes security features that provide the subscriber with secure access to services of the EPS, and protects particularly against several attacks on the radio link. This area is the largest and most vulnerable among all EPS security domains since it ensures the security of the radio link, the weakest link of all mobile telephone networks. In the LTE architecture, Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement (EPS-AKA) procedure is used to realize mutual authentication between the subscriber and the network. However, the current authentication and key agreement protocol 3GPP LTE-AKA has some issues, including bandwidth consumption, traffic overload due to control message and vulnerabilities. Several protocols have been proposed to solve these problems. In this paper, we will analyze and compare several existing protocols: EPS-AKA, SE-AKA, EC-AKA, and EC-AKA2 according to different factors in order to estimate the performances in terms of security, cost, and delay of each one of these protocols.