Performance Evaluation of Public Key Based Mechanisms for Mobile IPv4 Authentication in AAA Environments

Abstract

With the proliferation of mobile terminals, use of the Internet in mobile environments is becoming more common. In order to support mobility in these terminals, Mobile IPv4 was proposed, representing the standard in IPv4 environments. In this environment, authentication should be mandatory, because mobile terminals can utilize Internet services in all foreign domains. Mobile IPv4 provides symmetric key based authentication using the default HMAC-MD5. However, symmetric key based authentication creates a problem, when it comes to key distribution. In order to solve this problem, public key based authentication mechanisms were proposed. In this paper, the performance of each of these mechanisms is evaluated. The results demonstrate that, among these mechanisms, partial certificate based authentication results in superior performance, and certificate based authentication results in the worst performance. This paper creates the possibility of public key based authentication mechanisms being used for future mobile terminal authentication, although current public key based authentication mechanisms result in lower performance than symmetric key based authentication.

This research was supported by the MIC (Ministry of Information and Communication), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the IITA (Institute of Information Technology Assessment).