A cooperative cellular and broadcast conditional access system for Pay-TV systems

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.The lack of interoperability between Pay-TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay-TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay-TV systems. As a result, this paper presents the Mobile Conditional Access System (MICAS) as an end-to-end access control solution for Pay-TV systems. It incorporates the mobile and broadcasting systems and provides a platform whereby service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalize their services and adopt appropriate security measurements. This would result in the decrease of operating expenses and increase of customers' satisfaction in the system. The paper provides an overview of state-of-the-art conditional access solutions followed by detailed description of design, reference model implementation and analysis of possible MICAS security architectures.Strategy & Technology (S&T) Lt

Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES IN MOBILE NETWORKS, DIFFICULTIES AND SOLUTIONS

Mobile communication is playing a vital role in the daily life for the last two decades; in turn its fields gained the research attention, which led to the introduction of new technologies, services and applications. These new added facilities aimed to ease the connectivity and reachability; on the other hand, many security and privacy concerns were not taken into consideration. This opened the door for the malicious activities to threaten the deployed systems and caused vulnerabilities for users, translated in the loss of valuable data and major privacy invasions. Recently, many attempts have been carried out to handle these concerns, such as improving systems’ security and implementing different privacy enhancing mechanisms. This research addresses these problems and provides a mean to preserve privacy in particular. In this research, a detailed description and analysis of the current security and privacy situation in the deployed systems is given. As a result, the existing shortages within these systems are pointed out, to be mitigated in development. Finally a privacy preserving prototype model is proposed. This research has been conducted as an extensive literature review about the most relevant references and researches in the field, using the descriptive and evaluative research methodologies. The main security models, parameters, modules and protocols are presented, also a detailed description of privacy and its related arguments, dimensions and factors is given. The findings include that mobile networks’ security along with users are vulnerable due to the weaknesses of the key exchange procedures, the difficulties that face possession, repudiation, standardization, compatibility drawbacks and lack of configurability. It also includes the need to implement new mechanisms to protect security and preserve privacy, which include public key cryptography, HIP servers, IPSec, TLS, NAT and DTLS-SRTP. Last but not least, it shows that privacy is not absolute and it has many conflicts, also privacy requires sophisticated systems, which increase the load and cost of the system.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Spectrum sharing security and attacks in CRNs: a review

Cognitive Radio plays a major part in communication technology by resolving the shortage of the spectrum through usage of dynamic spectrum access and artificial intelligence characteristics. The element of spectrum sharing in cognitive radio is a fundament al approach in utilising free channels. Cooperatively communicating cognitive radio devices use the common control channel of the cognitive radio medium access control to achieve spectrum sharing. Thus, the common control channel and consequently spectrum sharing security are vital to ensuring security in the subsequent data communication among cognitive radio nodes. In addition to well known security problems in wireless networks, cognitive radio networks introduce new classes of security threats and challenges, such as licensed user emulation attacks in spectrum sensing and misbehaviours in the common control channel transactions, which degrade the overall network operation and performance. This review paper briefly presents the known threats and attacks in wireless networks before it looks into the concept of cognitive radio and its main functionality. The paper then mainly focuses on spectrum sharing security and its related challenges. Since spectrum sharing is enabled through usage of the common control channel, more attention is paid to the security of the common control channel by looking into its security threats as well as protection and detection mechanisms. Finally, the pros and cons as well as the comparisons of different CR - specific security mechanisms are presented with some open research issues and challenges

SECURITY MEASUREMENT FOR LTE/SAE NETWORK DURING SINGLE RADIO VOICE CALL CONTINUITY (SRVCC).

Voice has significant place in mobile communication networks. Though data applications have extensively gained in importance over the years but voice is still a major source of revenue for mobile operators. It is obvious that voice will remain an important application even in the era of Long Term Evolution (LTE). Basically LTE is an all-IP data-only transport technology using packet switching. Therefore, it introduces challenges to satisfy quality of service expectations for circuit-switched mobile telephony and SMS for LTE capable smartphones, while being served on the LTE network. Since 2013, mobile operators have been busy deploying Voice Over LTE (VoLTE). They are relying on a VoLTE technology called Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC) for seamless handover between packet-switch domain to circuit-switch domain or vice versa. The aim of thesis is to review and identify the security measurement during SRVCC and verify test data for ciphering and integrity algorithm.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Mobile and Wireless Information Systems: Applications, Networks, and Research Problems

Mobile and Wireless Information Systems received considerable interest in research and development communities. As a result, significant advances were made, which will affect our life both as users and researchers of mobile and wireless technologies. In this paper, we discuss both the current state of mobile and wireless information systems and the challenges in the wide-scale deployment and use of these systems. In particular, we address applications, wireless networks, mobile payments, security, challenges and research problems

Mobile IP: state of the art report

Due to roaming, a mobile device may change its network attachment each time it moves to a new link. This might cause a disruption for the Internet data packets that have to reach the mobile node. Mobile IP is a protocol, developed by the Mobile IP Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, that is able to inform the network about this change in network attachment such that the Internet data packets will be delivered in a seamless way to the new point of attachment. This document presents current developments and research activities in the Mobile IP area

Inter-Domain Authentication for Seamless Roaming in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The convergence of diverse but complementary wireless access technologies and inter-operation among administrative domains have been envisioned as crucial for the next generation wireless networks that will provide support for end-user devices to seamlessly roam across domain boundaries. The integration of existing and emerging heterogeneous wireless networks to provide such seamless roaming requires the design of a handover scheme that provides uninterrupted service continuity while facilitating the establishment of authenticity of the entities involved. The existing protocols for supporting re-authentication of a mobile node during a handover across administrative domains typically involve several round trips to the home domain, and hence introduce long latencies. Furthermore, the existing methods for negotiating roaming agreements to establish inter-domain trust rely on a lengthy manual process, thus, impeding seamless roaming across multiple domains in a truly heterogeneous wireless network. In this thesis, we present a new proof-token based authentication protocol that supports quick re-authentication of a mobile node as it moves to a new foreign domain without involving communication with the home domain. The proposed proof-token based protocol can also support establishment of spontaneous roaming agreements between a pair of domains that do not already have a direct roaming agreement, thus allowing flexible business models to be supported. We describe details of the new authentication architecture, the proposed protocol, which is based on EAP-TLS and compare the proposed protocol with existing protocols

SECURITY MEASUREMENT FOR LTE/SAE NETWORK DURING SINGLE RADIO VOICE CALL CONTINUITY (SRVCC).

Voice has significant place in mobile communication networks. Though data applications have extensively gained in importance over the years but voice is still a major source of revenue for mobile operators. It is obvious that voice will remain an important application even in the era of Long Term Evolution (LTE). Basically LTE is an all-IP data-only transport technology using packet switching. Therefore, it introduces challenges to satisfy quality of service expectations for circuit-switched mobile telephony and SMS for LTE capable smartphones, while being served on the LTE network. Since 2013, mobile operators have been busy deploying Voice Over LTE (VoLTE). They are relying on a VoLTE technology called Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC) for seamless handover between packet-switch domain to circuit-switch domain or vice versa. The aim of thesis is to review and identify the security measurement during SRVCC and verify test data for ciphering and integrity algorithm.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Secure End-to-End Communications in Mobile Networks

2009 - 2010Cellular communication has become an important part of our daily life. Besides using cell phones for voice communication, we are now able to access the Internet, conduct monetary transactions, send voice, video and text messages and new services continue to be added. The frequencies over which voice is transmitted are public, so voice encryption is necessary to avoid interception of the signal over the air. But once the signal reaches the operators Base Station (BS), it will be transmitted to the receiver over a wired or wireless mean. In either case, no protection is de ned. This does not seem a problem, but this is not true. Along the path across operator network, voice is at risk. It will only be encrypted again, with a di erent key, from the BS to the receiver if the receiver is herself a mobile user. Moreover, voice encryption is not mandatory. The choice whether or not to accept an unprotected communication is up to the network. When adopted, the same encryption algorithm is used for sending SMS messages between mobile telephones and base stations and for encrypting of calls. Unfortunately, vulnerabilities in this encryption systems were already revealed more than 10 years ago and more continue to be discovered. Currently the most popular communication technologies are the GSM and the UMTS. The UMTS is in use as a successor to GSM. Along with mobile phone services, It provides rapid data communication. The security algo- rithms in UMTS di ers from GSM in two important ways: encryption and mutual authentication. Although security standards have been improved, the end- to-end security is not provided... [edited by Author]IX n.s