End-to-End User Identity Confidentiality for UMTS networks

A standard security feature in any wireless network is user identity confidentiality. In Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), there are circumstances where this important security feature is compromised due to transmission of the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) in clear-text over the radio interface. Such situations defy anonymity of users. In addition, it is assumed that there is no threat from the agents in the wired network. In this paper, we introduce End-to-End User Identity Confidentiality (E2EUIC), an extension to 3GPP-AKA which not only takes care of identity confidentiality vulnerability over the wireless link, but goes one step ahead to ensure the same over the wired network as well.