A secure and lightweight authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobile networks

Abstract

Global Mobile Network provides global roaming service to the users moving from one network to another. It is essential to authenticate and protect the privacy of roaming users. Recently, Marimuthu and Saravanan proposed a secure authentication scheme for roaming service in mobile networks. This scheme can protect user anonymity, untraceability, and is believed to have many abilities to resist a range of attacks in global mobile networks. In this paper, we analyse the security strength of their scheme and show that the authentication protocol is in fact insecure against insider attack, stolen-verifier attack, impersonation attack, denial-of-service attack, synchronization problem, lack of user anonymity and operational inefficiencies. Hence, we propose a secure and lightweight authentication scheme for Global Mobile Networks. In addition, the proposed scheme requires few message exchanges between the entities such as MU (Mobile User), FA (Foreign Agent) and HA (Home Agent). The scheme ensures both communication and computation efficiency as compared to the well-known authentication schemes. The performance analysis shows that the proposed authentication scheme is well suited for resource limited wireless and mobile environments.