A More Secure and Efficient Authentication Scheme with Roaming Service and User Anonymity for Mobile Communications

In terms of convenience requirements, mobile communications have become one of the most important roaming services for wireless environments. Especially, how to prevent unauthorized users from illegitimate accesses in mobile communication systems has become an important issue. Password authentication with smart card is one of the mechanisms that were widely used to authenticate the validity of participants between a roaming user, the foreign agent and the home agent of a roaming user. In 2011, Yoon et al. proposed a user friendly authentication scheme with user anonymity for wireless communications and claimed that their scheme is secure and efficient using for battery-powered mobile devices in mobile communication systems. However, we observe that Yoon et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to insider attack, unfairness in session key computation, unable to provide user anonymity and is not easily reparable. In this paper, we offer a more secure and efficient authentication scheme to remedy its security weaknesses and provide reliable roaming accesses in mobile communication environments.