A Secure Anonymous Mobile Handover Authentication Protocol for Content Centric Network

Abstract

In current technological era, content centric network (CCN) is envisaged as a clean-slate future Internet architecture to meet the growing demand of information exchange as well as to ease smooth distribution of content. Recently, with the popularity of mobile devices, wireless mobile network (WMN) has become an integral part of our daily life. Through WMN mobile users can access information/content from Internet anytime even in roaming from one cellular network to another. However, due to limitation of coverage of an access point (AP) in WMN, mobile handover occurs frequently between the AP and mobile device. During handover process, privacy and security of a mobile consumer becomes a serious challenge since mobile user’s anonymity and non-traceability have to be maintained. However, mobility of consumer and content producer in CCN is a major concern which needs to be addressed along with its security aspect. In this paper, a lightweight anonymous handover authentication protocol for mobile users in CCN is proposed. The proposed scheme is designed to provide secure and seamless roaming service to mobile users. To overcome the limitations of resource constrained mobile devices, identity based cryptography (IBC) is used to design an anonymous mobile handover authentication and session key negotiation protocol in CCN. The security analysis of the proposed protocol is done to show its resilience against relevant cryptographic attacks.