A Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocol Using k-pseudonym Set in Wireless Networks

In recent years, since people pay more and more attention to the protection of their privacy, anonymous authentication in wireless networks has become a hot topic. Currently, most anonymous authentication schemes are based on the asymmetric keys whose tedious computation leads to serious resource consumption, therefore, they are unsuitable for mobile devices with limited capacity. To solve this problem, by introducing the k-pseudonym set we propose an anonymous authentication protocol based on a shared secret key. In the authentication process, the user sends the k-pseudonym set which includes his real identity and other k - 1 pseudonyms. After the authentication server traversals the shared keys with each of the users in the set and verifies the authentication information, it can determine the real user and complete the authentication. In this methodology, the construction of the pseudonym set is a key issue, and we give two attack models and respectively present the construction methods of the k-pseudonym set under those two models. Compared with the existing schemes, our scheme outperforms them in the security and practicality. Especially, user untractability can be realized. A testbed is set up and extensive experiments are conducted, and the results show the authentication latency of our scheme is short and it changes a little with the increase of k.