Security of 3G and 4G 3GPP Networks

Ulrike Meyer (IT Security - RWTH Aachen)

Thursday 18 November 2010, 15.00, b-it 1.25 (cosec meeting room)

The 2nd generation mobile communication standard GSM has several well-known vulnerabilities such as no usage of network authentication, no integrity protection and the use of weak encryption algorithms. The successor of GSM, the 3rd generation mobile communication standard UMTS was designed to fix these vulnerabilities. However, it was shown to be weak due to its backward compatibility with GSM in 2004. In addition, recently a vulnerability in one of the UMTS ciphers, the "KASUMI" cipher was found. In this talk I will provide an overview on the current state of 3G security and provide and introduction to the security architecture used in the 4th generation successor of UMTS, namely the Evolved Packet System.