Reducing Signaling Traffic for the Authentication and Key Agreement Procedure in an IP Multimedia Subsystem

In the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) of UMTS, two authentication procedures are necessary for IMS subscribers before accessing IMS services: (i) packet-switch domain authentication using the authentication and key agreement of the 3rd Generation Partnership Projects (3GPP AKA), and (ii) IMS authentication using IMS AKA. However, since IMS AKA is based on 3GPP AKA, almost all of the operations are the same. Besides, IMS AKA needs two round-trips to carry out. Therefore, it is inefficient that almost all involved steps in IMS AKA are duplicated. Therefore, we propose a one-pass IMS AKA instead of IMS AKA. The one-pass IMS AKA can keep the security properties of IMS AKA, such as mutual authentication and key agreement. Furthermore, the one-pass IMS AKA not only has at least 45% improvement over IMS AKA in terms of authentication signaling, but also has 76.5% improvement over IMS AKA in terms of storage space.