| Abstract: | Current wireless network standards perform user authentication, signaling and data encryption, as well as message integrity protection, by utilizing only symmetric key methods. However, as mobile networks are evolving into full-IP and the communication is envisaged to change from second generation (2G) person-to-person model to fourth generation (4G) machine-to-machine model, there is greater demand to provide more flexible, reconfigurable and scalable security mechanisms that can advance in a many-to-many trust relationship model. Employing public key methods in many-to-many schemes drops the requirement for a secure channel to transfer keys between two communication parties, thus providing the appropriate scalability to the whole system. With a large number of different network technologies and operators, expected in the future mobile communications environment, that should frequently and seamlessly interwork with each other, and a constantly increasing population of communication parties, capturing the full benefits of open channel key transfers and scaling public key methods requires Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). In this paper, we discuss and investigate different ways to take advantage of a proposed PKI system. From the network side, we investigate how PKI can provide future inter/intra mobile core network security, while from the user’s perspective we present solutions that far enhance authentication procedures and end-to-end communication model trust. We show that PKI offers the appropriate framework to overcome symmetric key based security inefficiencies, providing powerful solutions to protect both network core signaling and user’s data from potential intruders. |
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