• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.75-86
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• 2014

Demand for the femtocell is largely credited to the surge in a more always best connected communication conscious public. 3GPP defines new architecture and security requirement for Release 9 to deal with femtocell, Home eNode B referred as HeNB. In this paper, we analyze the HeNB security with respect to mutual authentication, access control, and secure key agreement. Our analysis pointed out that a number of security vulnerabilities have still not been addressed and solved by 3GPP technical specification. These include eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attack, compromising subscriber access list, and masquerading as valid HeNB. To the best of our knowledge, any related research studying HeNB security was not published before. Towards this end, this paper proposes an improved authentication and key agreement mechanism for HeNB which adopts proxy-signature and proxy-signed proxy-signature. Through our elaborate analysis, we conclude that the proposed not only prevents the various security threats but also accomplishes minimum distance from use-tolerable authentication delay.