An Anonymous Authentication Scheme with the Enhanced Security for Wireless Communications

In wireless communication system, a good protocol should satisfy many requirements: user identity authentication, privacy protection, computational efficiency and resist some known attacks. Thus design a highly secure anonymous authentication protocols for wireless networks is a challenging task. Over recent years, many researchers have proposed their own solutions to address this issue. In 2014, Niu et al. analyzed Yoon et al.’s authentication scheme, then put forward a smart card based authentication scheme with anonymity for wireless networks. They claimed their scheme achieves many security requirements and resists some known threats. Nevertheless, after detailed analysis, we prove that the scheme of Niu et al. is prone to some malicious attacks such as replay attacks and DoS attacks. Moreover, the scheme does not work when large amount of mobile users access a foreign agent simultaneously. To overcome these drawbacks, we present a new secure authentication scheme with user anonymity by improving Niu et al.’s scheme. The proposed protocol not only satisfies many security properties, such as strong anonymity, mutual authentication and periodically update session key, but also resists well-known threats. Furthermore, the security and performance analyses indicates that the new scheme is well suitable for wireless communications when it is compared with previous protocols.