ES-AKA: An Efficient and Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for UMTS Networks Neetesh Saxena 1,2 • Jaya Thomas 1,2 • Narendra S. Chaudhari 3,4 Published online: 17 April 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract The authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol of the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) was proposed to solve the vulnerabilities found in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) systems. The UMTS-AKA provides mutual authentication, but is still vulnerable to redirection attack, denial of service attack, and man-in-the-middle attack. Apart from various attacks possibilities, the UMTS-AKA has a problem of counter synchronization, generates huge overhead, and utilizes more bandwidth and message exchanges during the authentication. An intruder may apply these attacks to impersonate the network or mischarge the mobile users. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure AKA protocol namely ES-AKA to prevent the UMTS network against these problems and attacks. This protocol also solves the synchronization problem occurred between a mobile station MS and its home network HLR. The ES-AKA protocol generates lesser communication overhead as compared to UMTS-AKA, EXT- AKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, SKA-AKA, AP-AKA, X-AKA, EURASIP-AKA, Full-AKA, and U-AKA protocols. In addition, it also generates less computation overhead than the UMTS-AKA, EXT-AKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, S-AKA, Full-AKA, and U-AKA protocols. On an average, the ES-AKA protocol reduces 62 % of the bandwidth, which is the & Neetesh Saxena mr.neetesh.saxena@ieee.org Jaya Thomas jaya.thomas@stonybrook.edu Narendra S. Chaudhari narendra@iiti.ac.in 1 Department of Computer Science, State University of New York (SUNY), 119 Songdo, Moonhwa- ro, Yeonsu-Gu, Incheon, South Korea 2 Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, New York 11794, United States 3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, South Ambazari Road, Nagpur, India 4 Discipline of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, PACL Campus, 113/2-B, Opp. Veterinary College, Harniya Khedi, Mhow, Indore 453441, MP, India 123 Wireless Pers Commun (2015) 84:1981–2012 DOI 10.1007/s11277-015-2551-7