Anonymous handover authentication protocol for mobile wireless networks with conditional privacy preservation

With the development of the wireless communication technology and the popularity of mobile devices, the mobile wireless network (MWN) has been widely used in our daily life. Through the access point (AP), users could access the Internet anytime and anywhere using their mobile devices. Therefore, MWNs can bring much convenience to us. Due to the limitation of AP's coverage, the seamless handover frequently occurs in practical applications. How to guarantee the user's privacy and security and identify the real identity when he/she brings harm to the system becomes very challenging. To achieve such goals, many anonymous handover authentication (AHA) protocols have been proposed in the last several years. However, most of them have high computation costs because mobile nodes need to carry out the bilinear pairing operations or the hash-to-point operations. Besides, most of them cannot satisfy some critical requirements, such as non-traceability and perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we first outline the security requirements of AHA protocols, and then propose a new AHA protocol to eliminate weaknesses existing in previous AHA protocols. Based on the hardness of two famous mathematical problems, we demonstrate that the proposed AHA protocol is secure against different kinds of attacks and can meet a variety of security requirements. It can be seen from the details of implementations that the proposed AHA protocol also has much less computation cost than three latest AHA protocols.