A Novel NTRU-Based Handover Authentication Scheme for Wireless Networks

A well-designed anonymous handover authentication (AHA) protocol is essential to enable mobile nodes to roam securely and seamlessly across multiple access points. In recent years, several protocols based on bilinear pairing and elliptic curve cryptosystem have been presented. However, their security are based on the discrete logarithm on elliptic curve, which has been proven unsafe by the emergence of quantum computers. To address the issue, we propose a new lightweight AHA scheme based on the number theory research unit public key cryptosystem for wireless networks. Security analysis and simulation experiment results show that in addition to achieving mutual authentication and greater security to resist known attacks, the proposed protocol has lower implementation complexity in comparison with up-to-date handover authentication schemes.