An Adaptive Secure Handover Authenticated Key Agreement for Multi-Server Architecture Communication Applications

Abstract

Mobile terminals have been widely used in the communication applications (e.g., vehicular network, e-Health, smart grid and e-Commerce) as they can obtain all kinds of services and upload data for users anytime and anywhere. With the number of users increasing dramatically and user demands diversifying, multi-server architecture was proposed to solve issues on lack of service resources that single-server architecture remains. However, multi-server architecture faces a series of challenges in applications, such as security and authentication efficiency requirements. Thus, many authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols are presented, yet most of them require unacceptable computation and communication overhead, which is inefficient indeed. In this paper, we propose an adaptive secure handover authenticated key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture. Specifically, broadcast mechanism is utilized to assist users to select appropriate service providers with the lowest cost. Users can realize efficient handover authentication with multiple servers in the proposed scheme, that is, after completing initial authentication, users can switch to other servers and complete authentication through simple operations. Security analysis shows the proposed protocol can meet all security requirements and compared with other relevant protocols, it greatly reduces the computation and communication overhead. In addition, the above advantages grow significantly as the number of servers to be authenticated increases.