Lightweight mutual authentication scheme for protecting identity in insecure environment

Many improved authentication solutions were put forward, on purpose of authenticating more quickly and securely. However, neither the overuse of hash function, or additional symmetric encryption, can truly increase the overall security. Instead, extra computation cost degraded the performance. They were still vulnerable to a variety of threats, such as smart card loss attack and impersonation attack, due to hidden loopholes and flaws. Even worse, user's identity can be parsed in insecure environment, even became traceable. Aiming to protect identity, a lightweight mutual authentication scheme is proposed. Redundant operations are removed, which make the verification process more explicit. It gains better performance with average cost compared to other similar schemes. Cryptanalysis shows the proposed scheme can resist common attacks and achieve user anonymity. Formal security is further verified by using the widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool.