Security Model Evaluation of 3G Wireless Networks

Second generation mobile phone networks (2G) are currently the most widely used wireless telephone networks in the world. While being an improvement over earlier analog systems, 2G security standards have serious flaws: designed to provide strong authentication and over-the-air encryption, the algorithms used in 2G have been compromised, and means of circumventing the security model altogether have been discovered. Third generation mobile phone standards (3G) have been designed to address those issues and provide a better security model. However, they too have certain limitations. To provide background, this paper presents an overview of security in 1G and 2G networks along with pointing out the known problems.