Attacks on an Efficient Roaming Authentication Scheme

Abstract

With the rapid increase in mobility of mobile users across the globe, availing the services of a foreign network became a frequent event in our life. Providing services to mobile node in roaming becomes critical since foreign network and mobile node first mutually authenticate each other with the help of home network, acting as a trusted third party. If both the mobile node and foreign server authenticates each other then they agree on a secret key for future communications during the stay of mobile node in the premises of the foreign network. Intractability is an essential requirement for any roaming authentication protocol. In this paper, we give cryptographic analysis of a recent protocol proposed by Arshad et al. for authentication and establishment of secret parameters. The cryptanalysis of the protocol of Arshad et al. proves that the untraceability of the mobile node is not ensured as well as the scheme is not cost effective in verification of wrong password.