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A Generic Framework for Anonymous Authentication in Mobile Networks

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Abstract

Designing an anonymous user authentication scheme in global mobility networks is a non-trivial task because wireless networks are susceptible to attacks and mobile devices powered by batteries have limited communication, processing and storage capabilities. In this paper, we present a generic construction that converts any existing secure password authentication scheme based on a smart card into an anonymous authentication scheme for roaming services. The security proof of our construction can be derived from the underlying password authentication scheme employing the same assumptions. Compared with the original password authentication scheme, the transformed scheme does not sacrifice the authentication efficiency, and additionally, an agreed session key can be securely established between an anonymous mobile user and the foreign agent in charge of the network being visited. Furthermore, we present an instantiation of the proposed generic construction. The performance analysis shows that compared with other related anonymous authentication schemes, our instantiation is more efficient.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China

    Jing Xu & Wen-Tao Zhu (Member, IEEE)

Authors
  1. Jing Xu
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  2. Wen-Tao Zhu
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Correspondence to Jing Xu.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Basic Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 2013CB338003, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61170279 and 61272479, and the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant Nos. XDA06010701 and XDA06010702.

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Xu, J., Zhu, WT. A Generic Framework for Anonymous Authentication in Mobile Networks. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 28, 732–742 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-013-1371-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-013-1371-z

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