Lightweight authentication with key-agreement protocol for mobile network environment using smart cards

In 2012, Mun et al. proposed an enhanced secure authentication with key-agreement protocol for roaming service in global mobility networks environment based on elliptic curve cryptography. They claimed that their protocol is efficient and resistant to prominent security attacks. The careful analysis of this study proves that Mun et al. 's protocol is susceptible to several attacks such as replay attack, man-in-middle attack, user impersonation attack, privileged insider attack, denial-of-service attack, no login phase and imperfect mutual authentication phase. In addition, this study proposes an enhanced lightweight authentication with key-agreement protocol for mobile networks based on elliptic curve cryptography using smart cards. The proposed protocol is lightweight and perfectly suitable for real-time applications as it accomplishes simple one-way hash function, message authentication code and exclusive-OR operation. Furthermore, it achieves all the eminent security properties and is resistant to various possible attacks. The security analysis and comparison section demonstrates that the proposed protocol is robust compared with Mun et al. 's protocol.