A lightweight roaming authentication protocol for anonymous wireless communication

Abstract

In wireless network, a secure roaming authentication protocol enables a mobile user to get services from a foreign server when he/she is outside of the home server. However, the conventional approach requires the home server's participation during the authentication between the mobile user and the foreign server. So the larger number of the roaming requests are performed the heavier burden will be on the home server. Meanwhile, in wireless communication the privacy protection is also of great concern for the mobile user. In this paper we propose a lightweight roaming authentication protocol for anonymous wireless communication without the home server's participation. The new roaming authentication protocol takes advantage of the ID-based cryptography and provides user anonymity. It has good performance compared with the roaming authentication protocols whose authentication do not need the home server's participation in terms of security and computation costs. Moreover, it can be applied to various kinds of wireless networks such as Cellular Networks and Wireless Mesh Networks.