Security Enhancements for Privacy and Key Management Protocol in IEEE 802.16e-2005

Security is highly critical in wireless communication, as wireless media is vulnerable to attacks. Mobile WiMAX is a new standard and it opens new horizons for security researchers. In this paper, authorization protocol for both versions of PKM in WiMAX has been analyzed. Possible attacks are also considered including interleaving, replay and suppress replay attack and a methodology is presented to prevent these attacks. It also describes WiMAX architecture, privacy and key management (PKM) protocols, their shortcomings and existing solutions for providing security along with enhanced proposed security solution for mentioned attacks. Existing solutions address these problems using timestamp or nonce. A hybrid approach of nonce and timestamp has been proposed to prevent the authorization protocol from such attacks.