A Novel Pairing-Free Authentication Scheme With Anonymity for Mobile Infrastructure
Qingyu Ma, Miaolei Deng, Qing Song, Chunyan Zhang · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
Secure communication between mobile users and edge servers in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) environments needs to address challenges in data integrity, privacy, and authentication. Existing authentication and key agreement (AKA) schemes suffer from vulnerabilities such as offline key guessing and Known Session Specific Temporary Information (KSSTI) attacks, and are inefficient, putting pressure on resource-limited devices. This research proposes a novel pairing-free, multi-factor AKA scheme for mobile infrastructures that eliminates these attack surfaces while ensuring, among other things, perfect forward security, user anonymity, and untraceability. The scheme is formally validated against threats such as replay, man-in-the-middle, and KSSTI under the random oracle model based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithmic problem and the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. By avoiding bilinear pairing, the scheme significantly reduces 51.3% of server-side computation overhead, 35.3% of device-side computation overhead, 54.6% of energy consumption, 41.3% of communication overhead, and can enhance resilience to resource-constrained mobile devices, as compared to existing schemes.