Enhanced secure mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with user anonymity in ubiquitous global mobility networks

Abstract

With the widespread use of mobile gadgets, security in mobile communication becomes an important issue. In 2011, Zhou et al. proposed a mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with the user anonymity for roaming environments. In this article, however, we reveal that the authentication protocol presented by Zhou et al. suffers from certain weaknesses which have been overlooked during design. As a consequence of these weaknesses, Zhou et al.’s scheme cannot achieve desired security. Therefore, here we propose a novel authentication scheme to overcome these weaknesses that is efficient, secure, and causes significantly less computational overhead as compared to Zhou et al.’s scheme.