A Novel Authentication Protocol with Strong Security for Roaming Service in Global Mobile Networks

Abstract

In today’s society, Global Mobile Networks (GLOMONETs) have become an important network infrastructure that provides seamless roaming service for mobile users when they leave their home network. Authentication is an essential mechanism for secure communication among the mobile user, home network, and foreign network in GLOMONET. Recently, Madhusudhan and Shashidhara presented a lightweight authentication protocol for roaming application in GLOMONET. However, we found their protocol not only has design flaws, but is also vulnerable to many attacks. To address these weaknesses, this paper proposes a novel authentication protocol with strong security for GLOMONET based on previous work. The fuzzy verifier technique makes the protocol free from smart card breach attack, while achieving the feature of local password change. Moreover, the computational intractability of the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP) guarantees the security of the session key. The security of the protocol is verified by the ProVerif tool. Compared with other related protocols, our protocol achieves a higher level of security at the expense of small increases in computational cost and communication cost. Therefore, it is more suitable for securing the roaming application in GLOMONET.