**Key Management in Mobile WiMAX Networks**

Mohammad-Mehdi Gilanian-Sadeghi, Borhanuddin Mohd Ali and Jamalul-Lail Ab Manan

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/56154

**1. Introduction**

Wireless networks, because of their many advantages in comparison with the wired ones, have become the predominant technology for deployment of communications infrastructure. WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), which is an industry branding for IEEE 802.16 Wireless Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) sets of standard [1, 2], provides wireless access to mobile devices with a range of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for various types of applications. There are diverse versions of IEEE 802.16 standard, but IEEE 802.16e [3] also known as Mobile WiMAX, is the most well-known version, though newer versions have also been formulated.

As for the security model of IEEE 802.16, it has been designed to guarantee authentication, confidentiality and integrity. Among the series of IEEE 802.16 standards, the IEEE 802.16d [4] was defined for fixed wireless access. It uses Privacy Key Management Version 1 (PKMv1) to define, manage and distribute the security keys, but there are several security issues in PKMv1. Hence, in IEEE 802.16e, an enhanced key management scheme called Privacy Key Management Version 2 (PKMv2) was introduced to mitigate the security shortcomings of PKMv1. The PKMv2 uses Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) [5] and RSA algorithm [6] as authen‐ tication methods. The authentication mechanism ensures that when a Mobile Station (MS) enters a Base Station (BS) coverage area, it should perform authentication and authorization in order to obtain the security keys that will protect data more securely.

The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 elaborates the main concept of WiMAX architecture which focuses mainly on the security parts. Section 3 reviews key management protocols in Mobile WiMAX. Finally, section 4 presents our conclusion and suggestions for future works.

© 2013 Gilanian-Sadeghi et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
