Security Analysis and Improvement of an Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Roaming Services

An anonymous authentication scheme for roaming services in global mobility networks allows a mobile user visiting a foreign network to achieve mutual authentication and session key establishment with the foreign-network operator in an anonymous manner. In this work, we revisit He et al.’s anonymous authentication scheme for roaming services and present previously unpublished security weaknesses in the scheme: (1) it fails to provide user anonymity against any third party as well as the foreign agent, (2) it cannot protect the passwords of mobile users due to its vulnerability to an offline dictionary attack, and (3) it does not achieve session-key security against a man-in-the-middle attack. We also show how the security weaknesses of He et al.’s scheme can be addressed without degrading the efficiency of the scheme

Efficient Two-Pass Anonymous Identity Authentication Using Smart Card

Recently, Khan et al. proposed an enhancement on a remote authentication scheme designed by Wang et al. which emphasizes on using dynamic identity. They claim that their improvement can avoid insider attack. However, we found the scheme lacks the anonymity property. Moreover, R. Madhusudhan et al. indicate their scheme also suffers the insider attack. Due to these observations, in this paper we propose a novel one which not only anonymously authenticates the remote user by using only two passes but also satisfies the ten requirements of an authentication scheme using smart card mentioned by Liao et al.