Strong roaming authentication technique for wireless and mobile networks

When one considers the broad range of wirelessly connected mobile devices used today, it is clear that integrating such network-enabled devices into secure roaming over wireless networks is of essential importance. Over the years, many authentication protocols have been suggested to address this issue. Among these protocols, the recently proposed privacy-preserving universal authentication protocol, Priauth, exceeds the security and efficiency of other authentication techniques. This paper studies the existing roaming authentication protocols and shows that they are not strong enough to provide secure roaming services in three aspects. Further, using Priauth as an example, we propose efficient remedies that fix the weaknesses. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches are feasible in practice. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The key findings presented in the paper are as follows. (1) Existing roaming authentication protocols are not strong enough to provide secure roaming services in three aspects. (2) We propose efficient remedies that fix the weaknesses. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches are feasible in practice. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.