Nested One-Time Secret Mechanisms for Fast Mutual Authentication in Mobile Communications

Many security mechanisms for mobile communications have been introduced in the literature. Among these mechanisms, authentication plays a quite important role in the entire mobile network system and acts as the first defense against attackers since it can ensure the correctness of the identities of distributed communication entities before they engage in any other communication activity. Therefore, in order to guarantee the quality of this advanced service, an efficient (especially, user efficient) and secure authentication scheme is urgently desired. In this paper, we come up with a novel authentication mechanism, called the nested one-time secret mechanism, tailored for mobile communication environments. Through maintaining inner and outer synchronously changeable secrets, respectively, every mobile user can be rapidly authenticated by a VLR and the HLR, respectively, in the proposed scheme. Not only does the proposed solution achieve mutual authentication, but also it greatly reduces the computation and communication cost of the mobile users as compared with the existing authentication schemes.