PAPAR: Pairing Based Authentication Protocol with Anonymous Roaming for Wireless Mesh Networks

In wireless networks, secure authentication protocol should enable a legitimate roaming user to get roaming services from foreign server when he/she is away from home domain. However, a basic authentication protocol requires participation of home server, foreign server and roaming user during the authentication between roaming user and foreign server. Recently, two-party based anonymous authentication protocols have been proposed, which does not require home server's participation, to protect identity, location and route information of the roaming users. But, the available anonymous authentication protocols are not efficient due to the shortcomings in security and high computational cost. This paper addresses those problems and proposes a novel two-party based anonymous authentication protocol for the roaming users, named PAPAR. PAPAR uses pairing-based cryptography to secure and to provide computationally efficient authentication. Further, PAPAR uses pseudo identities to ensure user anonymity. Moreover, PAPAR efficiently mitigates the effect of DoS (Denial of Service) attack by using light computational operations, such as Message Authentication Code. Comparison and experimental results show that PAPAR outperforms the existing works in terms of security and computational cost.