Security Scheme for LTE Initial Attach

Abstract

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a fourth-generation mobile communication technology implemented throughout the world. There is still, however, an exposed vulnerability with regard to the identification parameters such as IMSI and RNTI, as they are transmitted in plain text during the initial attach procedure in the access to the LTE network. The vulnerability has existed since the initial release of the LTE Standards, and is still present in Release 12. To prevent a leak of the identification parameters during the initial attach process and a possible third party attack, the relevant parameters should be encrypted. This paper proposes a security scheme to safely transmit identification parameters in different cases of the initial attach. The proposed security scheme solves the exposed vulnerability by encrypting the parameters in transmission. Using an OPNET simulator, it is shown that the average rate of delay and processing ratio are efficient in comparison to the existing process.