The Universal Mobile Telecommunication Standard (UMTS) is continuously evolving to meet the increasing demand of modern mobile and Internet applications for high capacity and advanced features in security and quality of service. Although admittedly enhanced in terms of security as compared to GSM (2G) systems, UMTS still has some weaknesses that may often lead to several security incidents. In this article, we come up with a novel authentication mechanism based on the one-time-secret security capabilities, which can assure an expeditious mobile communication environment and simultaneously be able to deal with the several issues related to security vulnerabilities (Redirection Attack, Man-in-the-Middle-Attack) and others like the excessive bandwidth consumption, storage overhead in VLR etc. existing in the current mobile communication (UMTS). In addition, here we also introduce a new concept called "Neighborhood Policy", where several VLRs can form groups among themselves and carry out significant responsibilities in order to authenticate a User without interfering HLRs even though the User moves to a new VLR (belongs to the same group). We argue that the proposed solution not only achieves the mutual authentication in a secure manner, but at the same time, it also greatly reduces the computation and communication cost of the mobile User as compared to the existing state of the art authentication schemes.
