On the Design of Lightweight and Secure Mutual Authentication System for Global Roaming in Resource-Limited Mobility Networks

Abstract

A secure authentication protocol plays a crucial role in securing communications over wireless and mobile networks. Due to resource-limitations and the nature of the wireless channel, the global mobile networks are highly susceptible to various attacks. Recently, an efficient authentication system for global roaming has been proposed in the literature. In this article, we first show that the analyzed authentication system is vulnerable man-in-the-middle attack, replay attack and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, and it does not ensure untraceability and local password-verification process to identify wrong passwords. To fix these security flaws, we propose a more efficient and robust authentication system for roaming in mobility networks. We use the formal verification tools like ProVerif, Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) and Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic to check the regularity of the authentication protocol. Moreover, we prove the secrecy of a session key through the formal security using the random oracle model, known as Real-Or-Random (ROR) model. Finally, a detailed performance evaluation proves that the security protocol not only provides a security strength, but also preserves the low computational overhead. Thus, the proposed authentication protocol is secure and computationally efficient as compared to other relevant schemes.