Jong-Hyouk Lee

The Mobile Broadband Association has developed the MIS and MISAUTH protocols as link-layer fast authentication protocols. A combination of MIS and MISAUTH protocols, called as MISP, provides secure and fast connection for a wireless access network, but it has been reported that MISP creates a weak session key and suffers from a denial-of-service attack. In addition, a transaction with an authentication server that is required for every authentication is considered as a delay factor during handovers. In this paper, we present an improvement of MISP that utilizes the fast handover approach of Fast Mobile IPv6 and minimizes an involvement of the authentication server while eliminating identified security drawbacks of MISP. The formal security analysis is performed to verify the correctness of the proposed scheme. Moreover, the handover performance of the proposed scheme is compared with an existing scheme.

Wireless communication service providers have been showing strong interest in Proxy Mobile IPv6 for providing network-based IP mobility management. This could be a prominent way to support IP mobility to mobile nodes, because Proxy Mobile IPv6 requires minimal functionalities on the mobile node. While several extensions for Proxy Mobile IPv6 are being developed in the Internet Engineering Task Force, there has been little attentions paid to developing efficient authentication mechanisms. An authentication scheme for a mobility protocol must protect signaling messages against various security threats, e.g., session stealing attack, intercept attack by redirection, replay attack, and key exposure, while minimizing authentication latency. In this paper, we propose a Diffie-Hellman key based authentication scheme that utilizes the low layer signaling to exchange Diffie-Hellman variables and allows mobility service provisioning entities to exchange mobile node's profile and ongoing sessions securely. By utilizing the low layer signaling and context transfer between relevant nodes, the proposed authentication scheme minimizes authentication latency when the mobile node moves across different networks. In addition, thanks to the use of the Diffie-Hellman key agreement, pre-established security associations between mobility service provisioning entities are not required in the proposed authentication scheme so that network scalability in an operationally efficient manner is ensured. To ascertain its feasibility, security analysis and performance analysis are presented.