An efficient and secure anonymous authentication scheme for mobile satellite communication systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a new efficient and secure anonymous authentication scheme for mobile satellite communication systems. Compared with the related schemes, the proposed scheme achieves the following three main advantages - (1) It is just based on a secure one-way hash function for avoiding complex computations for both mobile users and network control center (NCC), (2) it does not require sensitive verification table which may cause NCC to become an attractive target for numerous attacks (e.g., insertion attacks and stolen-verifier attacks), and (3) it provides higher security level (e.g., secure mutual authentication and key establishment, confidential communication, user`s privacy, simple key management, and session key independence). As a result, the proposed scheme is very suitable for lightweight-device environments because of very low computation overload on the part of both mobile user and NCC.