An Authentication and Security Protocol for Mobile Computing

The main contributions of this paper are: (1) to analyze an authentication and key distribution protocol for mobile computing proposed by Beller, Chang and Yacobi in 1993, and reveal two problems associated with their protocol. (2) to propose a new authentication and key distribution protocol that utilizes a broadcast channel in a mobile network. A particularly interesting feature of the new proposal is that it allows the authentication of a base station by a mobile user to be conducted "at the background", which yields a very compact protocol whose total number of moves of information between a mobile user and a base station is only 1.5 ! Keywords Authentication, Cryptography, Key Distribution, Mobile Computing, Security 1 SECURITY ISSUES IN WIRELESS NETWORKS Recent years have seen an explosive growth of interest in wireless (information) networks that support the mobility of users (and terminals). These networks serve as a foundation of future universal, mobile and ubiquitous perso..