A Lightweight Handover Authentication Protocol based on Proxy Signature for Wireless Networks

The authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols plays an improtant role to validate the communication entities in the wireless network. The applications of the wireless networks are secure only after the successful authentication of the communication entities during the handover. To obtain the secrecy in these applications, various handover protocols have been proposed. Unfortunately, most of the existing handover protocols suffer from key escrow problem and can't achieve the key forward/backward secrecy. Moreover, these protocols incur various identified attacks and high bandwidth consumption during the handover process. Hence, these protocols are not suitable for secure authentication in wireless networks. However, the proxy signature based handover protocols are also proposed by the researchers but, these protocols fail to accomplish all the security properties. To overcome the above problems, we propose the proxy signature based lightweight handover authentication protocol for wireless network. The proposed protocol fulfills all the security demands and avoids the identified attacks. The security analysis of the protocol proves the security against the malicious attacks. Finally, the performance analysis shows that the protocol obtains the improved results in terms of the communication and computation overhead compared to existing protocols.