An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Handover Authentication Scheme for Mobile Wireless Network

An efficient and secure authentication protocol is essential to enable the mobile devices handover seamlessly to a different access point. However, due to the limited computation resource and battery capacity in mobile devices as well as the openness and insecurity of wireless channel, designing an efficient and secure handover scheme for wireless network is a challenging task. Furthermore, most of the existing handover schemes are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks and cannot yield good performance. According to the analysis of the current schemes, we summarize the security goals that should be fulfilled by the handover authentication scheme. In this paper, we present a new handover authentication and key agreement scheme on elliptic curve cryptosystem for mobile wireless networks which does not involve the trusted third party and provides privacy-preserving mutual authentication between mobile devices and the access point. The proposed scheme consists of three phases: system setup, handover preparation, handover authentication. We give the details of each phase. The theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed scheme achieves universal security features. The secrecy of the generated session key and mutual authentication of the proposed scheme are verified by ProVerif. In addition, performance comparison shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the related schemes in terms of computation cost and communication overhead.