Password Authentication Technique for 3-G Mobile Communications

Authentication of mobile subscribers and network are a challenge of future researchers due to increasing security threats and attacks with the enhanced volume of wireless traffic. 3G mobile communication system has been developed to speed up the data communication. 3G mobile communication uses two different switching techniques: circuit switching for voice and low speed data communications, and packet switching mainly for data communication, but can afford voice communication like VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), video telephony, multimedia service etc. Generally high speed data communication uses packet switching process through PDSN (Packet Data Serving Node) servers. In circuit switching (3G network), authentication is mutual where both MS and MSn or network authenticate each other, but in packet switching only network (servers in PDSN) examines the authenticity of MS. In this paper, we propose a mutual authentication technique that verifies the authenticity of the subscriber as well as the network by subscriber's password. We focus on the advantages of our proposed technique, termed as password based mutual authentication technique.