WiMAX security analysis and enhancement

The importance of IEEE 802.16, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is growing and will compete with technologies such as 3G. The acceptance and adoption of technologies also depend on security. Therefore, this article shows security vulnerabilities found in WiMAX and gives possible solutions to eliminate them. We find the initial network procedure is not effectively secured that makes man-in-the-middle attack possible. Focusing on this attack, we propose Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange protocol to enhance the security level during network initialization. We modify DH key exchange protocol to fit it into mobile WiMAX network as well as to eliminate existing weakness in original DH key exchange protocol. Finally we found that the proposed algorithm shows 2.5 times better performance in comparison with existing systems.