Survey of network access security in UMTS/LTE networks

Mobile communications have known an impressive development in recent years, and are characterized by a trend towards broadband communications and extremely diverse applications. For some of these applications, such as financial transactions, shopping or online social networks, security is of extreme importance. This paper presents a survey of the most important and most vulnerable part of the security of wireless networks: network access. The study includes the protocols used by UMTS and LTE standards as well as some of the latest protocols proposed in the literature.