A fast authentication method for secure and seamless handoff

Abstract

In mobile networks such as Mobile IP, a symmetric-key-based authentication method is a typical solution for identifying genuine users of the networks, but restricts scalability of the communications. From this reason, several asymmetric-key-based authentication methods are proposed to release the restriction. However, these methods still suffer from the heavily procedures, especially in the handoff, and public keys can not be distributed efficiently in advance. This paper introduces a key distribution and authentication mechanism for the handoff method with a certificate-based authentication. The computer simulations show that the proposed method provides low key distribution overhead of the authentication with no communications disruption.