Secure and Efficient Handover Authentication Based on Bilinear Pairing Functions

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 48 - 53
• Main Authors: Daojing He, Chun Chen, Chan, Sammy, Jiajun Bu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.01.2012; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Access methods and protocols, osi model; Applied sciences; Authentication; Communication system security; Computer crime; Cryptography; efficiency; Exact sciences and technology; handover authentication; Information, signal and communications theory; Laptop; Manganese; Mathematical analysis; Multiple access; Pattern recognition; Privacy; Protocols; Security; Signal and communications theory; Signal processing; Signatures; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Teleprocessing networks. Isdn; Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments); Wireless communication; Wireless networks; Performance evaluation; Laptop computer; Mobile radiocommunication; Private life; Multiple access; efficiency; handover authentication; Wireless telecommunication; privacy; Pattern recognition; Implementation; Handwriting recognition; security; Wireless networks; Authentication; Batch process; Security of data; Handover; Wireless network; Access protocol; Handwritten character recognition; Cryptography
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2011.110811.111240

Seamless handover over multiple access points is highly desirable to mobile nodes, but ensuring security and efficiency of this process is challenging. This paper shows that prior handover authentication schemes incur high communication and computation costs, and are subject to a few security attacks. Further, a novel handover authentication protocol named PairHand is proposed. PairHand uses pairing-based cryptography to secure handover process and to achieve high efficiency. Also, an efficient batch signature verification scheme is incorporated into PairHand. Experiments using our implementation on laptop PCs show that PairHand is feasible in real applications.