More Robust Anonymous Authentication with Link-Layer Privacy

Recently, the problem of protecting privacy at link-layer is of great importance in wireless environments, mainly due to the fact that the wireless link layer is not protected by current technologies used in wireless networks. This leads to many potential threats to security and user privacy. Very recently, Lu et al. proposed an authentication scheme for wireless link-layer privacy which is based on the idea of identity-based encryption from bilinear pairings. The scheme however does not support the security against the type of known-key attack, called key-compromise impersonation. This limits the use of the scheme in that such a security hole can potentially be extended to many additional attacks, causing more serious consequences in practice. In this paper, we demonstrate that how the attack can be launched and also provide an enhanced construction in order to solve the problem. Our scheme has almost the same performance as that of Lu et al. in terms of both computation and communication cost, while it provides much better security results.