A Secure and Efficient Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol with Smart Cards for Wireless Communications

Mobile user authentication and key agreement for wireless networks is an important security priority. In recent years, several user authentication and key agreement protocols with smart cards for wireless communications have been proposed. In 2011, Xu et al. proposed an efficient mutual authentication and key agreement protocol with an anonymity property. Although the protocol of Xu et al. has many benefits, we find that it still suffers from several weaknesses which have been previously overlooked. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient mutual authentication and key agreement protocol. Confidentiality of the session key and updating of the password efficiently are presented as the main contributions of this paper. Finally, evaluations of our proposed protocol show that our protocol can withstand various known types of attacks, and also satisfies essential functionality requirements. Additionally, efficiency analyses show that our protocol is simple and cost-efficient.