Cryptanalysis of an Anonymous Mutual Authentication Scheme for Secure Inter-device Communication in Mobile Networks

Abstract

Anonymous authentication allows one entity to be authenticated by the other without revealing the identity information. In mobile networks, mobile devices communicate with each other to exchange resources. To achieve anonymous mutual authentication, the devices are anonymously authenticated under the trusted server. Recently, Chung et al. proposed a efficient anonymous mutual authentication scheme for inter-device communication using only low-cost functions, such as hash functions and exclusive-or operations. However, we find that their protocol does not preserve user’s privacy in terms of untraceability. Also, their protocol is vulnerable to a denial of service attack and a user impersonation attack.