IMAPS: Imbricated Authentication Protocol Suite for Mobile Users and Groups

The rapid advancement and the wide-spread use of the Internet and wireless communications in our professional endeavors and personal lives are making ubiquitous authenticated connectivity for mobile users indispensable. Individuals and groups may roam within a network or across networks, either in infrastructure or ad hoc mode. In any case, uninterrupted authenticated communication would be required for numerous applications, in particular real-time multimedia applications. In this paper, we propose an imbricated protocol suite for authentication in different mobility contexts at both the intra- and inter-network levels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive treatment of authentication in mobile networks. We demonstrate that our solution supports seamless secure mobility while incurring low overhead in the authentication process.