Analysis and improvement of a secure and efficient handover authentication for wireless networks

A handover authentication protocol in mobile networks enables mobile nodes to securely and seamlessly roam over multiple access points. Many such protocols have been proposed but shown to be either insecure or inefficient. Very recently, a novel handover authentication protocol named PairHand was proposed, which has been shown to outperform all other protocols in terms of security and efficiency. However, we identify an inherent design weakness in the handover authentication phase of PairHand, and demonstrate that under certain circumstances it is vulnerable to a session key compromised problem. Further, we propose a simple modification to fix the identified security problem without losing any features (such as high efficiency and robust security) of PairHand. Experiments using our implementation on Laptop PCs show that the suggested modification is applicable in real world applications. © 1997-2012 IEEE.