Preventing delegation-based mobile authentications from man-in-the-middle attacks

In this paper, an approach of mutual authentication and key exchange for mobile access, based on the trust delegation and message authentication code, is developed, and a novel nonce-based authentication approach is presented. The proposed protocols can effectively defend all known attacks to mobile networks including the denial-of-service attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. In particular, in contrast to some previous work, our design gives users a chance to set a session key according to users' will, and does not require a mobile user to compute useless hash key chains in the face of HLR-online authentication failures or run the initial authentication protocol before HLR-offline authentication. Moreover, our design enjoys both computation efficiency and communication efficiency as compared to known mobile authentication schemes. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.