Anonymous authentication protocol based on elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman for wireless access networks
Wen‐Bin Hsieh, Jenq‐Shiou Leu · Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing · 2012
Anonymous channel tickets have been proposed as a way to provide user anonymity and to reduce the overhead of re-authentication for authentication in wireless environments. Chen et al. proposed a secure and efficient protocol, based on a protocol proposed by Yang et al., which is resistant to guessing attacks on networks from which users’ secret keys are easy to obtain. However, their scheme is time-consuming in the phases of ticket issuing and authentication. Furthermore, a malicious attacker can utilize the expired time, Texp, to launch a denial of authentication (DoA) attack, which is a type of denial of service attack. Because Texp is exposed to any user, it would be easy to launch a DoA attack that could make the scheme impractical. To resist against DoAs that the scheme of Chen et al. might suffer, we propose an improved scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography in this paper. Our scheme not only reduces time cost but also enhances security. The basis of the proposed scheme is the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. The operations of points of an elliptic curve are faster and use fewer bits to achieve the same level of security. Therefore, our scheme is more suitable for mobile devices, which have limited computing power and storage. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.