Wireless access systems and radio access technologies (RATs) have been developed to provide different types of services. Some examples of the wireless access systems include wireless local area networks (WLANs), (such as IEEE 802-based networks), and cellular networks, (such as universal mobile telecommunication systems (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN), an evolved UTRAN (E-UTRAN), a GPRS/EDGE radio access network (GERAN), or the like). E-UTRAN (evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network) is the air interface of 3GPP's Long Term Evolution (LTE) upgrade path for mobile networks.
Mobile Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a broadband wireless access technology based on Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16 standard. Mobile WiMAX uses a scalable orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) scheme to deliver wireless broadband packet data services to mobile terminals.
A base station or a subscriber station may support management message integrity protection based on cipher-message authentication code (CMAC) together with the AES block cipher. A message received, that contains a CMAC tuple, shall not be considered authentic if the length field of the tuple is incorrect, or if the locally computed value of the digest does not match the digest in the message.
In some systems, for example, in conjunction with the standard of the IEEE 802.16-2009, a CMAC tuple is defined in TLV format in the MAC management message. Since the CMAC tuple is always the last attribute in the message, a receiver can easily locate the part of message required for CMAC verification by excluding the CMAC TLV. In some systems, for example, in conjunction with the standard of the IEEE 802.16m, the MAC control messages are defined in ASN.1 format using PER (packed encoding rules) with the byte unaligned option. If the CMAC tuple is included in the ASN.1 message, the receiver may not be able to locate the part of message to be authenticated by using AES-CMAC algorithm.