A practical authentication protocol with anonymity for wireless access networks

Abstract

The use of anonymous channel tickets was proposed for authentication in wireless environments to provide user anonymity and to probably reduce the overhead of re-authentications. Recently, Yang et al. proposed a secure and efficient authentication protocol for anonymous channel in wireless systems without employing asymmetric cryptosystems. In this paper, we will show that Yang et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to guessing attacks performed by malicious visited networks, which can easily obtain the secret keys of the users. We propose a new practical authentication scheme not only reserving the merits of Yang et al.'s scheme, but also extending some additional merits including: no verification table in the home network, free of time synchronization between mobile stations and visited networks, and without obsolete anonymous tickets left in visited networks. The proposed scheme is developed based on a secure one-way hash function and simple operations, a feature which is extremely fit for mobile devices. We provide the soundness of the authentication protocol by using VO logic. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.