A strong user authentication scheme with smart cards for wireless communications

Seamless roaming over wireless network is highly desirable to mobile users, and security such as authentication of mobile users is challenging. Recently, due to tamper-resistance and convenience in managing a password file, some smart card based secure authentication schemes have been proposed. This paper shows some security weaknesses in those schemes. As the main contribution of this paper, a secure and light-weight authentication scheme with user anonymity is presented. It is simple to implement for mobile user since it only performs a symmetric encryption/decryption operation. Having this feature, it is more suitable for the low-power and resource-limited mobile devices. In addition, it requires four message exchanges between mobile user, foreign agent and home agent. Thus, this protocol enjoys both computation and communication efficiency as compared to the well-known authentication schemes. As a special case, we consider the authentication protocol when a user is located in his/her home network. Also, the session key will be used only once between the mobile user and the visited network. Besides, security analysis demonstrates that our scheme enjoys important security attributes such as preventing the various kinds of attacks, single registration, user anonymity, no password/verifier table, and high efficiency in password authentication, etc. Moreover, one of the new features in our proposal is: it is secure in the case that the information stored in the smart card is disclosed but the user password of the smart card owner is unknown to the attacker. To the best of our knowledge, until now no user authentication scheme for wireless communications has been proposed to prevent from smart card breach. Finally, performance analysis shows that compared with known smart card based authentication protocols, our proposed scheme is more simple, secure and efficient. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.