The University of British Columbia

Many advantages are attained by integrating 3G and WLAN systems to form a 3G-WLAN interworking architecture. However, securing the architecture is a great challenge because of the number of vulnerabilities introduced. EAP-AKA is the authentication solution adopted by the 3GPP to secure accesses to 3G-WLAN architectures. Two types of EAP-AKA authentication are available, full authentication and fast re-authentication. This paper presents a localized fast re-authentication protocol to substitute the standard fast re-authentication protocol. The proposed protocol achieves faster re- authentication by locally performing the authentication procedure. A new keying framework is introduced to minimize authentication delays during re-authentication and handover operations.