Secure communication mechanisms for GSM networks

Abstract

With the advance of wireless communications technology, mobile communications has become more convenient than ever. However, because of the openness of wireless communications, how to protect the privacy between communicating parties is becoming a very important issue. In this paper, we focus on the security of the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) networks. A secure communication architecture for the GSM network is proposed. In the proposed architecture, we use public-key cryptography for user authentication and stream cipher for message encryption and decryption. An authentication protocol and a key generation method are presented in conjunction with the proposed architecture. Cryptanalysis and operational analysis show that the authentication protocol is secure and efficient. Simulation results indicate that the key generation method can always produce key strings of evenly distributed 0's and 1's and with infinite period.