An efficient authentication protocol supporting privacy in mobile computing environments

The anticipated increase in mobility and popular use of mobile services will require more technologies for authenticating mobile hosts and protecting their privacy. However, issues such as privacy and confidentiality in mobile computing environments and the resource restriction of mobile hosts have not been given enough consideration. In this paper, we present an authentication protocol that provides mobile hosts with the functionalities of authentication and session key distribution for user privacy and secure communication. Considering mobile computing environments, our protocol has design principles such as reducing computation and communication overhead of mobile hosts, and uses random numbers, time-stamps, and authentication codes in order to protect systems from attacks by eavesdroppers. While our protocol supports authentication, secure communication, anonymity, and untraceability for mobile hosts, it can be an efficient authentication protocol for mobile computing environments.