ESAP: Efficient and secure authentication protocol for roaming user in mobile communication networks

The Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) network is proposed to mitigate the security problems and vulnerabilities observed in the mobile telecommunication system. However, the GSM network is vulnerable to different kinds of attacks such as redirection attack, impersonation attack and Man in-the Middle (MiTM) attack. The possibility of these attacks makes the wireless mobile system vulnerable to fraudulent access and eavesdropping. Different authentication protocols of GSM were proposed to overcome the drawbacks but many of them lead to network signalling overload and increases the call set-up time. In this paper, an efficient and secure authentication and key agreement protocol (ESAP-AKA) is proposed to overcome the flaws of existing authentication protocol for roaming users in the GSM network. The formal verification of the proposed protocol is presented by BAN logic and the security analysis is shown using the AVISPA tool. The security analysis shows that the proposed protocol avoids the different possible attacks on the communication network. The performance analysis based on the fluid flow mobility model shows that the proposed protocol reduces the communication overhead of the network by reducing a number of messages. On an average, the protocol reduces 60% of network signalling congestion overhead as compared with other existing GSM-AKA protocols. Moreover, the protocol not only removes the drawbacks of existing protocols but also accomplishes the needs of roaming users.