An efficient and secure authentication scheme with user anonymity for roaming service in global mobile networks

Abstract

In global mobile network, it is essential to authenticate mobile users and provide secure communication between a user, foreign agent and the home agent using session key. Designing a secure and efficient authentication protocol for roaming users in mobile network is a challenging. The authors wen et al. analyzed Jiang et al. authentication scheme recently and proved that the scheme cannot resist with replay attack and stolen-verifier attack. Later, they come up with a smart card based authentication scheme for roaming service. The Wen et al.'s scheme protects anonymity of the user and is believed to have many abilities to resist a various kind of cryptographic attacks. However, through careful analysis, we find that Wen et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to bit flipping attack, impersonation (forgery attacks), insider attack, denial-of-service attack, unfair key agreement and cannot provide user's anonymity. To remedy these weaknesses and to achieve low communication and computation costs, we proposed an efficient secure authentication scheme for roaming users in global mobile networks. The performance analysis shows that the proposed authentication protocol is simple and secure. © 2016 ACM.