An Improvement on Privacy and Authentication in GSM.

There are a lot of subscribers of GSM across the world. GSM is one of the major achievements in modern cellular telephony. The authentication protocol for GSM has some drawbacks [1,2]. We show why drawbacks occur and propose an improvement on privacy and authentication in GSM not only to improve drawbacks but also to achieve the goals as follows: mutual authentication, reduction of bandwidth consumption between VLR and HLR, reduction of storage space of VLR database, reduction of authentication data flows, security and efficiency. In particular, we show a possible attack to threat MS's location privacy. The merit of the proposed protocol is that it is based on the existing security algorithm A3, A5 and A8. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]