Enhancing the privacy of LTE-based public safety networks

Abstract

The existence of Public Safety Network(PSN) is critical for saving lives in tragic incidents. Within PSN, privacy preservation becomes vital since the information being transferred may be personally identifiable (or private for short). Long Term Evolution(LTE) has been chosen to be the suitable technology for PSN because of its unique characteristics such as higher capacity, higher spectral efficiency, enhanced security and reliability and so on. In spite of those features, several issues related to privacy within LTE have been detected by the experts. However, a study of privacy challenges and requirements in PSN has not yet emerged. This study aims to highlight privacy issues of the LTE related to PSN. Thus, a comprehensive review of the relevant works proposed to improve privacy of the LTE security architecture is provided. Furthermore, the feasibility of those efforts for PSN is discussed. Finally, an efficient solution is proposed to enhance the privacy of the LTE-based PSN. The idea is to hide the real International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) within a random bit stream of certain size where only the subscriber and HSS could extract the respective IMSI. Furthermore, performance evaluation and security analysis of the proposed protocol are explored.