A smart card based generic construction for anonymous authentication in mobile networks

The global mobility network can offer effective roaming services for a mobile wireless user between his home network and a visited network. For the sake of privacy, user anonymity has recently become an important security requirement for roaming services, and is a topic of concern in designing related protocols such as mutual authentication and key agreement. In this paper we present a generic construction, which converts any password authentication scheme based on the smart card into an anonymous authentication protocol for roaming services. Compared with the original password authentication scheme, the transformed protocol does not sacrifice authentication efficiency, and additionally, an agreed session key can be securely established between an anonymous mobile user and the foreign agent in charge of the network being visited.