Analysis and Improvement of a Privacy-Aware Handover Authentication Scheme for Wireless Network

To enable mobile device seamlessly and securely handover to different access points, a secure and efficient handover authentication scheme is desperately required. However, it is an arduous issue to design a secure handover scheme for wireless network because mobile nodes are limited in power and computational capability, handover latency is severely restricted and wireless network is opening and insecure. To deal the issue, we propose an improved privacy-aware handover authentication scheme for wireless network. We give the security proof to demonstrate our proposed scheme can provide mutual authentication and secure key agreement, and can resist all kinds of known security attacks. Compared with up-to-date similar handover schemes, our proposed scheme not only meets the security requirements of handover scheme, but also decreases computation cost and communication cost. Therefore, our proposed scheme is more suitable for wireless network than the similar schemes.