Abstract:
WiMAX is the fourth generation technology that offers broadband wireless access over long distances to enable pervasive, high-speed mobile Internet access to the widest array of devices. As WiMAX standards expand from considering a fixed line-of-sight propagation and point-to-multipoint infrastructure high frequency system to a lower frequency non-line-of-sight mobile system, WiMAX is open to more security threats than other wireless systems. An authentication and authorization protocol protects the resources of a network from unauthorized access. And after authenticating each other, the Subscriber Station (SS) and Base Station (BS) exchange the key that is used to secure the data communication between them. Although there are standard authentication protocols in IEEE 802.16 but still WiMAX is vulnerable to attacks such as replay attack, denial of service (DoS) attack, interleaving attack etc. The most severe denial of service attack is the attack due to the resource exhausting validation procedure that has to be performed for all SS's authorization request. .
In this dissertation entitled "Secure Authentication Scheme for Privacy and Key Management in IEEE 802.16e', a Proxy Base Station based authentication protocol has been proposed. The proposed protocol addresses the major attacks namely DoS attack, interleaving attack, replay attack and downgrade attack. With the introduction of Proxy Base Station (PS), the task of validation is distributed between the PS and BS which resolves the DoS attack due to the resource exhausting validation procedure. The proposed authentication protocol is modeled and verified on Colored PetriNet tool. The results show that our proposed protocol is secure and efficient.
