Title: A new handover authentication protocol based on bilinear pairing functions for wireless networks

Authors: Debiao He; Muhammad Khurram Khan; Neeraj Kumar

Addresses: School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China; State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China ' Center of Excellence in Information Assurance, King Saud University, Riyadh 11653, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ' Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Thapar University, Patiala 147004, India

Abstract: Seamless handover over multiple access points is highly desirable to mobile nodes, but ensuring security and efficiency of this process is challenging. Many such protocols have been proposed but most of them are either insecure or inefficient. Very recently, He et al. proposed an improved protocol to overcome the weakness of a novel handover authentication protocol, namely PairHand. Later, they pointed out that their protocol is vulnerable to a private key compromised problem under certain circumstances and proposed an improved protocol to overcome the weakness. In this paper, we examine the security of He et al.'s improved protocol and show it is vulnerable to a private key compromised problem. To improve security, we propose a new ID-based signature protocol and construct a new handover authentication protocol based on the proposed signature protocol.

Keywords: wireless networks; network security; privacy protection; efficiency; handover authentication; bilinear pairing; seamless handover; mobile nodes; compromised private key; ID-based signature protocol.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2015.067774

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2015 Vol.18 No.1/2, pp.67 - 74

Received: 08 Aug 2013
Accepted: 22 Jan 2014
Published online: 05 Mar 2015 *

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