A Novel and Efficient Privacy Preserving TETRA Authentication Protocol

TETRA (Trans-European Trunked Radio) is the main trunking technology European standard for Private Mobile Radio systems (PMR). TETRA is one of the best choices to be implemented in SCADA environment to provide interoperability for the whole system. The authentication and privacy-preserving of users is quite critical. In addition, the system should prevent adversary from tracing the movement of mobile radio subscribers. This paper discusses the vulnerabilities of TETRA authentication protocol namely the availability and unlinkability of mobile radio subscribers. It identifies a serious linkability attack against the protocol threatening the privacy of subscribers. In the following we have fixed the protocol with a much better efficiency than other proposed schemes. The security of the proposed scheme is further analyzed with BAN-Logic and ProVerif analysis tool.