A Privacy Preserving Authentication Scheme for Roaming in IoT-Based Wireless Mobile Networks

The roaming service enables a remote user to get desired services, while roaming in a foreign network through the help of his home network. The authentication is a pre-requisite for secure communication between a foreign network and the roaming user, which enables the user to share a secret key with foreign network for subsequent private communication of data. Sharing a secret key is a tedious task due to underneath open and insecure channel. Recently, a number of such schemes have been proposed to provide authentication between roaming user and the foreign networks. Very recently, Lu et al. claimed that the seminal Gopi-Hwang scheme fails to resist a session-specific temporary information leakage attack. Lu et al. then proposed an improved scheme based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for roaming user. However, contrary to their claim, the paper provides an in-depth cryptanalysis of Lu et al.’s scheme to show the weaknesses of their scheme against Stolen Verifier and Traceability attacks. Moreover, the analysis also affirms that the scheme of Lu et al. entails incorrect login and authentication phases and is prone to scalability issues. An improved scheme is then proposed. The scheme not only overcomes the weaknesses Lu et al.’s scheme but also incurs low computation time. The security of the scheme is analyzed through formal and informal methods; moreover, the automated tool ProVerif also verifies the security features claimed by the proposed scheme.

Mobility over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Accessing wireless services and application on the move has become a norm among casual or business users these days. Due to societal needs, technological innovation, and networks operators’ business strategies, there has been a rapid proliferation of many different wireless technologies. In many parts of the world, we are witnessing a wireless ecosystem consisting of wide-area, low-to-medium-bandwidth network based on access technologies such as GSM, GPRS, and WCDMA, overlaid by faster local area networks such as IEEE 802.11-based Wireless LANs and Bluetooth pico-networks. One notable advantage of wide-area networks such as GPRS and 3G networks is their ability to provide access in a larger service area. However, a wide-area network has limited bandwidth and higher latency. 3G systems promise a speed of up to 2Mbps per cell for a non-roaming user. On the other hand, alternative wireless technologies like WLAN 802.11and Personal area network (PAN) using Bluetooth technology have limited range but can provide much higher bandwidth. Thus, technologies like WWAN and WLAN provide complementary features with respect to operating range and available bandwidth. Consequently, the natural trend will be toward utilizing high bandwidth data networks such as WLAN, whenever they are available, and to switch to an overlay service such as GPRS or 3G networks with low bandwidth, when coverage of WLAN is not available. Adding to the existing public networks, some private institutions (i.e., universities) have joined the fray to adopt wireless infrastructure to support mobility within their premises, thus adding to the plethora of wireless networks. With such pervasiveness, solutions are required to guarantee end-user terminal mobility and maintain always-on session connections to the Internet. To achieve this objective, an end device with several radio interfaces and intelligent software that would enable the automatic selection of networks and resources is necessary (Einsiedler, 2001; Moby Dick, 2003).