Towards Generalized ID-based User Authentication for Mobile Multi-server Environment

[[abstract]]With the popularity of Internet and wireless networks, more and more network architectures are used in multi-server environment, in which mobile users remotely access servers through open networks. In the past, many schemes have been proposed to solve the issue of user authentication for multi-server environment and low-power mobile devices. However, most of these schemes have suffered from many attacks because these schemes did not provide the formal security analysis. In this paper, we first give a security model for multi-server environment. We then propose an ID-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme based on bilinear maps for mobile multi-server environment. Our scheme can be used for both general users with a long validity period and anonymous users with a short validity period. Under the presented security model, we show that our scheme is secure against all known attacks. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme is well suitable for low-power mobile devices