Enhanced One-Pass IP Multimedia Subsystem Authentication Protocol for UMTS

Xuelian Long, James Joshi

Abstract: Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) can support IP Multimedia services by including the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as part of its core network. To use IMS services, a user equipment needs to first authenticate itself with the UMTS and then with the IMS. However, these two authentication protocols share many similar operations. Recent research efforts have highlighted this issue and hence researchers have proposed one-pass authentication protocols to reduce the number of such overlapping steps and to address security vulnerabilities in the original IMS protocol. In this paper, we propose an enhanced one-pass authentication protocol that addresses the weaknesses of the two previously proposed one-pass authentication protocols. We also provide comparative analysis of our proposed work with the existing approaches in terms of performance, security and compatibility.