Research On The Authentication And Registration Scheme For AAA-Based Mobile IP

Mobile IP (MIP) enables a mobile node to roam amongst IP access points without service disruption. As a main feature, MIP is completely transparent to applications since the mobility is handled without changing and reconfiguring the mobile node's IP address when its point of attachment to the Internet changes. It is expected to be the core infrastructure of future mobile communication.However, MIP still needs to be extended in order to be more suitable for supporting mobility amongst different domains and some mechanisms are needed to let domains dynamically verify the identity of the mobile nodes, and authorize the connectivity. Therefore, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is currently analyzing the interactions between MIP authentication and AAA (Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting) procedures in a joint effort. In the resulting new combined infrastructure, the main aspect to be considered is the interaction between the MIP protocol and the AAA functionality, in order to execute both user registration and handover amongst different Internet access points. The purpose of this thesis is mainly to investigate this issue.First, the working principles of MIP are introduced. The security issues, the corresponding countermeasures, and the handover issues of MIP are analyzed in detailed. Second, the system structure of AAA, the current AAA protocols, and the requirements of the application of AAA in MIP are introduced. Then, the combined MIP and AAA scheme proposed by IETF is analyzed. It is found that there always has a relatively high latency in the authentication and registration process.In order to solve this problem, an improved scheme is proposed in this thesis. The new scheme can provide fast authentication and registration through minimizing the number of the messages exchanged between the foreign and the home networks. In addition, by using the hybrid cryptography based on public key and symmetric key, the security of the messages is protected and the new scheme has the feasibilities of security, fast handover, low cost, and high scalability.