Changhee Hahn  Hyunsoo Kwon  Junbeom Hur

LTE Location privacy authentication Security

The number of subscribers in 4th generation mobile system has been increased rapidly. Along with that, preserving subscribers’ privacy has become a hot issue. To prevent users’ location from being revealed publicly is important more than ever. In this paper, we first show that the privacy-related problem exists in user authentication procedure in 4th generation mobile system, especially LTE. Then, we suggest an attack model which allows an adversary to trace a user, i.e. he has an ability to determine whether the user is in his observation area. Such collecting subscribers’ location by an unauthorized third party may yield severe privacy problem. To keep users’ privacy intact, we propose a modified authentication protocol in LTE. Our scheme has low computational overhead and strong secrecy so that both the security and efficiency are achieved. Finally, we prove that our scheme is secure by using the automatic verification tool ProVerif.