Secure communication mechanisms for GSM networks

With the advance of wireless communications technology, mobile communicatio ns has become more convenient than ever. However, because of the openness o f wireless communications, how to protect the privacy between communicating parties is becoming a very important issue. In this paper, we focus on the security of the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) networks. A s ecure communication architecture for the GSM network is proposed. In the pr oposed architecture, we use public-key cryptography for user authentication and stream cipher for message encryption and decryption. An authentication protocol and a key generation method are presented in conjunction with the proposed architecture. Cryptanalysis and operational analysis show that th e authentication protocol is secure and efficient. Simulation results indic ate that the key generation method can always produce key strings of evenly distributed 0's and 1's and with infinite period.