Towards generalized ID‐based user authentication for mobile multi‐server environment

Abstract

SUMMARY 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. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.