Improving mobile authentication with new AAA protocols

The rapid growth of wireless technology and the increasing use of such technologies in coordination with the Internet demand a very careful look at issues related to security. As more and more users attempt to utilize such technologies in the context of providing security demanding services, it is essential to recognize the potential threats in wireless technologies. This paper focuses on authentication as part of the significant issues related to security and proposes a new authentication method combining the AAA framework and the UMTS security. As for that, this work presents results that show how the concepts of AAA and the USIM mechanism can be combined for the adaptability of mobile environment as well as for the efficient authentication. It also presents the specification and the implementation of the combination of Diameter of the AAA protocols and USIM. In addition to the design implementation, this work reports on the performance results showing that this combination can be a good solution to authentication in a mobile environment.