Evaluation of Security Attacks on UMTS Authentication Mechanism

In this study security of internet access over the Third Generation (3G) telecommunication systems is considered and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is selected as the most popular system among 3G systems. The study then focuses on network access security mechanism of UMTS, called Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA). In addition, twenty types of important attacks and threats in UMTS system are presented and classified based on three major security factors; authentication, confidentiality, and data integrity. The evaluations finally show that the authentication factor is more interesting than other factors for hackers. Then, we describe four attacks named; man-inthe-middle, denial of service, identity catching, and redirection as the most significant attacks against authentication mechanism. Furthermore, we provide some solutions and methods to improve AKA mechanism and prevent these attacks in UMTS system.