Formal Security-Proved Mobile Anonymous Authentication Protocols with Credit-Based Chargeability and Controllable Privacy

Abstract

Smart mobile phones are widely popularized and advanced mobile communication services are provided increasingly often, such that ubiquitous computing environments will soon be a reality. However, there are many security threats to mobile networks and their impact on security is more serious than that in wireline networks owing to the features of wireless transmissions and the ubiquity property. The secret information which mobile users carry may be stolen by malicious entities. To guarantee the quality of advanced services, security and privacy would be important issues when users roam within various mobile networks. In this manuscript, an anonymous authentication scheme will be proposed to protect the security of the network system and the privacy of users. Not only does the proposed scheme provide mutual authentication between each user and the system, but also each user’s identity is kept secret against anyone else, including the system. Although the system anonymously authenticates the users, it can still generate correct bills to charge these anonymous users via a credit-based solution instead of debit-based ones. Furthermore, our protocols also achieve fair privacy which allows the judge to revoke the anonymity and trace the illegal users when they have misused the anonymity property, for example, if they have committed crimes. Finally, in this paper, we also carry out complete theoretical proofs on each claimed security property.