Robust ID based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme preserving user anonymity in mobile networks

With the swift growth of wireless technologies, an increasing number of users rely on the mobile services which can exchange information in mobile networks. Security is of key issue when a user tries to access those services in this network environment. Many authentication schemes have been presented with the purpose of authenticating entities and wishing to communicate securely. Recently, Chou et al. and Farash-Attari presented two ID authentication schemes. They both claimed that their scheme could withstand various attacks. However, we find that the two authentication schemes are vulnerable to trace attack while having a problem of clock synchronization. Additionally, we show that Farash-Attari's scheme is still susceptible to key-compromise impersonation attack. Therefore, we present an enhanced scheme to remedy the security weaknesses which are troubled in these schemes. We also demonstrate the completeness of the enhanced scheme through the Burrow-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic. Security analysis shows that our scheme prevents the drawbacks found in the two authentication schemes while supporting better secure attributes. In addition, our scheme owns low computation overheads compared with other related schemes. As a result, our enhanced scheme seems to be more practical and suitable for resource-constrained mobile devices in mobile networks.