A progressive approach to design authentication protocols for mobile heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous networks is a convergence of different wireless and mobile networks such as WiMax, 3G and LTE. These technologies need to cooperate to provide users with any time anywhere connectivity, hence the support for this heterogeneous environment is required. The wide scale deployment of such heterogeneous networks will result in a radical change in the network infrastructure, where current closed systems such as 3G will have to operate in an open and heterogeneous environment and interoperate with other network technologies. This raises a serious security issue in terms of authenticating and authorizing mobile terminals on these various networks. This paper presents a progressive approach for designing Authentication and Key Agreement protocol in heterogeneous networks. The protocol is formally verified using formal methods approach and its security features are validated using a number of relevant threat models