Novel blockchain-assisted fault-tolerant roaming authentication protocol for mobility networks without home agent entanglement

In mobility networks, users can receive desired services from foreign agents securely by means of a roaming authentication protocol. During the past decade, scholars have attempted to propose efficient and secure protocols. Nevertheless, careful observation of related works demonstrates that previously -proposed protocols have the following limitations. First, the home agent involvement is required for each key exchange between foreign agent and user, and if, for some reasons, home agent goes down, users of that home agent could no longer get services. Second, in these protocols, authors have assumed that home and foreign agents have a pre -shared key without discussing how this key can be generated, shared, or updated. Third, since in these protocols, the foreign agent needs to send any request from a user to his/her home agent, the number of messages and communication overhead are pretty high. In conclusion, in this paper, by suggesting a novel blockchain-assisted protocol, we intend to cover the above -mentioned crucial gaps. That is to say, our protocol is fault -tolerant, is free from the home agent involvement, and does not require any pre -shared key. Further, it has less overall latency and time compared to the related works. All of these merits have been achieved by a comparable computational cost and better communication overhead, which are demonstrated through our comparisons. More specifically, compared to all related protocols, the proposed one demonstrates at least 37% decrease in the communication overhead.