Establishing a Secure Peer Identity Association Using IMS Architecture

The advent of ubiquitous computing and the convergence of the heterogeneous networks provide new opportunities for the new players to enter the operator market. While network access will be available everywhere, the multitude and diversity of the access operators makes it hard to rely on the old paradigms of static operator relationships guaranteeing the identity of the users end-to-end. Therefore, there is need for mechanisms that allow the endpoints get assurance about the identity of their counterparts. This paper investigates the possibility of taking advantage of IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) in a roaming scenario to signal the needed identity parameters between two communication endpoints, which are basing their trust evaluation on their own home operators. This allows establishing a host identity protocol (HIP) style identity association, which can be used to protect any subsequent communication between the same entities.