Evaluation of Security Architectures for Mobile Broadband Access

Abstract

During the last few years, mobile broadband access has been a popular concept in the context of fourth generation (4G) cellular systems. After the wide acceptance and deployment of the wired broadband connections, such as DSL, the research community in conjunction with the industry have tried to develop and deploy viable mobile architectures for broadband connectivity. The dominant architectures which have already been proposed are Wi-Fi, universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), WiMax, and flash-orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM). In this chapter, we analyze these protocols with respect to their security mechanisms. First, a detailed description of the authentication, confidentiality, and integrity mechanisms is provided in order to highlight the major security gaps and threats. Subsequently, each threat is evaluated based on three factors: likelihood, impact, and risk. The technologies are then compared taking their security evaluation into account. Flash-OFDM is not included in this comparison since its security specifications have not been released in public. Finally, future trends of mobile broadband access, such as the evolution of WiMax, mobile broadband wireless access (MBWA), and 4G are discussed.