A Novel Anonymous Mutual Authentication Protocol With Provable Link-Layer Location Privacy

Location privacy of mobile users (MUs) in wireless communication networks is very important. Ensuring location privacy for an MU is an effort to prevent any other party from learning the MU's current and past locations. In this paper, we propose a novel anonymous mutual authentication protocol with provable link-layer location privacy preservation. We first formulate the security model on the link-layer, forward-secure location privacy, which is characterized by the fact that even when an attacker corrupts an MU's current location privacy, the attacker should be kept from knowing how long the MU has stayed at the current location. Then, based on the newly devised keys with location and time awareness, a novel anonymous mutual authentication protocol between the MUs and the access point (AP) is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first developed anonymous mutual authentication scheme that can achieve provable link-layer, forward-secure location privacy. To improve efficiency, a Preset in Idle technique is exercised in the proposed scheme, which is further compared with a number of previously reported counterparts through extensive performance analysis.