An optimized authentication protocol for mobile networks

Practical secure communication of mobile systems with low communication cost has become one of the major research directions. An established public key infrastructure (PKI) provides key management and key distribution mechanisms, which can lead to authentication and secure communication. Adding public key cryptography to Kerberos provides a nice congruence to public key protocols, which can obviate the human users’ burden to manage strong passwords. This paper emphasizes on authentication as a considerable issue related to security. Additionally, an efficient and secure hybrid authentication protocol for large mobile network is proposed. Its infrastructure accommodates explosive growth of the large mobile network. It reduces the communication cost for providing secure network access in inter-domain communication. This method is based on symmetric cryptosystem, PKI, challenge–response and hash chaining.