Research On Handover Authentication Schemes For EAP-based Wireless Networks

Recently, with the wide application of wireless networks, it is an important issue toprovide a secure network access for mobile users. For this purpose, the secureauthentication is a feasible technology. Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is aframework for the secure access in wireless networks. It supports different EAPmethods for various wireless networks. However, a full EAP authentication takes about1s which is unacceptable in a handover process. So a secure and efficient scheme isrequired to accomplish the handover authentication. Based on the analysis of exsitinghandover authentication schemes, we design two schemes to achieve privacy preservingin the handover authentication process for EAP-based wireless networks. The basiccontants are as follows:(1) This paper analyzes the existing handover authentication schemes for EAPbased wireless naetworks, which can be divided into two categories: thesymmetrical key-based handover authentication scheme and the publickey-based handover authentication scheme.(2) We design a handover authentication scheme with privacy preserving. In thisscheme, based on the proxy signature scheme, MN and AP can accomplishauthentication without involving any third party. The detailed security analysisshows that our scheme can achieve the privacy preserving andforward/backward security. In addition, we evaluate the latency performance ofthe proposed scheme by the analysis and simulation. The results demonstratethat our scheme is more effcient in terms of computation and communicationoverhead.(3) We also design a handover authentication scheme with location privacypreserving based on a proxy ring signature scheme, which allows the mobilenode (MN) to be authenticated without revealing its identity and locationprivacy due to the inherent anonymity of the proxy ring signature. Moreover,the performance analysis shows that our scheme only requires pointmultiplication operations on the resource-constraints MN. Thus, it is well suitedfor low-power mobile devices in the wireless networks.