New safety measure to protect the 3G/4G SIM cards against cloning

Abstract

A new security mechanism that could be implemented in the mobile phones for a more strength safety measure in cellular network communications is proposed. It permits of reinforcing at the same time the authentication process of the subscriber and the data encryption communicated between subscriber and network. In fact, the attack that could put in risk the security of subscribers and operators, namely the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card cloning, remains possible because of some failures observed in the authentication process and the encryption key generation used by the SIM card and the Univer-sal SIM (USIM) card of the mobile phones in 3G/3G++ and 4G, respectively. Our proposal is based on signal processing technique of spectral spread called Code-division multiple access (CDMA). The idea is to use the pseudo-random codes for spreading the resulting information of the authentication algorithm. This makes very difficult to decrypt the encrypted communications between subscriber and the operator. Further, spreading of information extends the data and increase the size of the encryption key to be used. We have tested the robustness of our proposal against many possible attacks and the results are very promising.