An Efficient Authentication Scheme for Access Control in Mobile Pay-TV Systems

In a mobile pay-TV system, a large number of messages are exchanged for mutual authentication purposes. In traditional authentication schemes, with one-to-one delivery, one authentication message per request is delivered from a head end system to subscribers. This results in the delivery of a large quantity of messages and therefore is inefficient and costly. Moreover, since most traditional schemes use an RSA-based signature for identity validation and nonrepudiation of communication, they suffer from high communication costs. Due to its wireless nature, mobile pay-TV is vulnerable to attacks during hand-off. As traditional schemes do not support hand-off authentication, they are insecure during hand-off. With these shortcomings, they are not suitable for mobile pay-TV. In this paper, we propose an innovative authentication scheme, in which, by providing one-to-many facility, only one authentication message for multiple requests is broadcasted from the head end system to subscribers. By employing bilinear property of pairing and elliptic curve cryptography, our scheme provides one-to-many facility in the case of multiple requests for the same service in a short period of time. This new scheme achieves better broadcast efficiency and performance on communication costs than traditional ones. Additionally, this scheme provides a hand-off authentication mechanism to protect the access of services while preventing attacks during hand-off; therefore, the scheme is more secure to support access control. Moreover, to provide anonymous authentication for protecting identity privacy, the scheme adopts an identity-based scheme while traditional schemes do not apply. The scheme inherits advantages of the identity-based scheme that a public key does not need to be certificated, the certification authority mechanism will not be needed and the key exchange overhead can be reduced. With these advantages of our scheme, it is well suited for mobile pay-TV system.