New One-Pass Universal AKE Protocol for Anonymous Wireless Roaming

Wang et al. (in: 2011 IEEE international conference on communications (ICC), IEEE, 2011, pp 1–5) designed an one-pass authenticated key establishment (AKE) protocol for anonymous wireless roaming, with the properties that it only requires one message flow to achieve key establishment between the roaming user and foreign server without involving the user’s home server, and it ensures normal user anonymity. Since then, almost no such style of proposal specifically designed for wireless roaming has been presented, to the best knowledge of the author. However, in this work, we identify and detail a fatal security weakness against Wang et al.’s scheme, wherein any adversary can impersonate a legal server to a user. Aiming to design a truly secure one-pass AKE protocol for the anonymous wireless roaming setting, a new proposal based on Wang et al.’s work, integrating the traditional certificated-based public key cryptosystem and identity-based cryptosystem, is also presented in this work. The new one-pass AKE protocol for the anonymous wireless roaming is universal in the sense that the protocol and message flow remain consistent whether a user is communicating with their home server or a foreign server. Moreover, unlike Wang et al.’s work without formal security proof, the new scheme is formally proved under the CK adversary model, together with the heuristic security attributes discussion, which all demonstrate that the new scheme has perfect security attributes. Besides, the efficiency analysis also demonstrates the new scheme has comparable computation efficiency.