  The growing popularity of multimedia applications, pervasive connectivity,
higher bandwidth, and euphoric technology penetration among the bulk of the
human race that happens to be cellular technology users, has fueled the
adaptation to Long Term Evolution (LTE)/ System Architecture Evolution (SAE).
The LTE fulfills the resource demands of the next generation applications for
now. We identify security issues in the authentication mechanism used in LTE
that without countermeasures might give superuser rights to unauthorized users.
The LTE uses static LTE Key (LTE-K) to derive the entire key hierarchy such as
LTE follows Evolved Packet System-Authentication and Key Agreement (EPS-AKA)
based authentication which discloses user identity, location, and other
Personally Identifiable Information (PII). To counter this, we propose a public
key cryptosystem named International mobile subscriber identity Protected
Console Grid-based Authentication and Key Agreement (IPG-AKA) protocol to
address the vulnerabilities related to weak key management. From the data
obtained from threat modeling and simulation results, we claim that the IPG-AKA
scheme not only improves the security of authentication procedures, it also
shows improvements in authentication loads and reduction in key generation
time. The empirical results and qualitative analysis presented in this paper
proves that IPG-AKA improves security in authentication procedure and
performance in the LTE.
