An Authentication Protocol in LTE-WLAN Heterogeneous Converged Network Based on Certificateless Signcryption Scheme With Identity Privacy Protection

Aiming at to avoid the security drawbacks of the authentication protocol in Long Term Evolution-Wireless Local Area Network (LTE-WLAN) heterogeneous converged network proposed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an improved protocol based on hybrid cryptosystem is proposed to achieve access authentication for WLAN user equipment(UE) with identity privacy protection. The security analysis shows that by using certificateless signcryption(CLSC) scheme without pairing calculation based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), hash chain and identity index mechanism, the proposed authentication protocol provides the following ten kinds of security properties: anonymous protection for International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), update on shared keys, protection for master session key(MSK), resistance to impersonation attack, replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, redirect attack and Denial of Service (DoS) attack, mutual authentication between communication entities, and without framework modification from the original protocol. The performance analysis shows that the approximate calculation time of all the communication entities is 79 ms in total and that of UE is 266 us. Thus, our proposed protocol is superior to some other related improved protocols in terms of security and efficiency.