Design and FPGA implementation of an efficient security mechanism for mobile pay‐TV systems

Abstract

SummaryA mobile pay‐TV service is one of the ongoing services of multimedia systems. Designing an efficient mechanism for authentication and key distribution is an important security requirement in mobile pay‐TV systems. Until now, many security protocols have been proposed for mobile pay‐TV systems. However, the existing protocols for mobile pay‐TV systems are vulnerable to various security attacks. Recently, Wang and Qin proposed an authentication scheme for mobile pay‐TV systems using bilinear pairing on elliptic curve cryptography. They claimed that their scheme could withstand various attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate that Wang and Qin's scheme is vulnerable to replay attacks and impersonation attacks. Furthermore, we propose a novel security protocol for mobile pay‐TV systems using the elliptic curve cryptosystem to overcome the weaknesses of Wang and Qin's scheme. In order to improve the efficiency, the proposed scheme is designed in such a way that needs fewer scalar multiplication operations and does not use bilinear pairing, which is an expensive cryptographic operation. Detailed analyses, including verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool and implementation on FPGA, demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only withstands active and passive attacks and provides user anonymity but also has a better performance than Wang and Qin's scheme.