On the benefit of context-awareness for security mechanisms in LTE/EPS networks

In the context of internet of things, mobile operators face the challenge to host millions of devices with various capabilities and intelligence. With the traditional connectivity management in Long Term Evolution / Evolved Packet System (LTE/EPS) networks, security services such as confidentiality and integrity protection are designed to be activated in a systematic manner leading to significant signaling and processing cost. Therefore, new strategies need to be devised for cost-effective security provision. In this paper, we motivate the integration of a context-aware security controller into LTE/EPS networks to minimize the overall security cost. This controller activates security mechanisms according to the contextual information such as the application type and the device capabilities. By means of detailed quantitative analysis, we evaluate the processing cost associated to each security service. We demonstrate that the gain that is achieved in terms of processing cost justify taking additional complexity to support adaptive security mechanisms.