Anonymous Mutual Authentication Scheme for Secure Inter-Device Communication in Mobile Networks

An anonymous authentication scheme provides privacy preserving communication. Recently, many anonymous authentication schemes have been proposed, and various cryptanalysis and improvements have been followed. Some schemes use high-cost functions, such as symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic functions while the others use low-cost functions such as hash functions and simple bitwise operations. The previous schemes are based on the client-server model and a server anonymously authenticates clients. In this paper, we propose an anonymous authentication scheme for communication between client-side devices. The proposed scheme preserves secure inter-device communication by providing anonymous mutual authentication and fair key agreement. Since the proposed scheme uses only low-cost functions, it can apply to mobile networks considering lower energy consumption.