Security issues on B-ISDN billing system

The Broadband Integrated Service Digital Networks (B-ISDN) offers a wide variety of services to customers. From both network provider's and user's perspective, a fair and flexible billing system is indispensable to the operation of B-ISDN. In this paper, we review several critical issues which are related to the B-ISDN billing system. Flat rate and usage-based rate are the two most commonly used billing policies. Because of the diversity of B-ISDN services, combining these two billing policies along with priority pricing is a feasible scheme to be used by the B-ISDN billing system. Also, because of security concern, an authentication framework has to be built into the billing system. Two protocols, the membership authentication protocol and the personal authentication protocol, are suggested to meet the security requirements of the two billing policies, respectively. The former applies the CBC-encryption in the two-party authentication protocol while the latter is based on the STS authentication protocol. A key management method based on Harn and Lin's master key concept is also presented.