Secure User Authentication Protocol for Roaming Services in Mobile Networks Using Blockchain

Increase in wireless devices made mobile communication pervasive. Global Mobile Networks (GLOMONET) provision the roaming service to accomplish this, where mobile users must experience secure and seamless roaming services over multiple foreign agents. The main objective of network providers is to have mutually authenticated, secured, and lightweight service to guard mobile user’s data and privacy. Many interesting roaming authentication protocols have been proposed to achieve the security and privacy of mobile users in traditional communication networks. But they all suffer from one or another known security attack with the fact that current mobile networks are prone to attacks. Blockchain technology offers its advantages to establish a secure connection and authentication by safeguarding mobile user information and privacy with its immutable nature. The study shows that limited work has been done in space protocol design for GLOMONET using blockchain technology and the main goal of the protocol is to maintain security for transactional data and privacy of the mobility users along with anonymity property. In this article, soulbound tokens are used to issue credentials between the mobile user and Home Agent (HA) by serving as a secure and decentralized form of digital identity. The idea behind using soulbound tokens for issuing credentials is to create a tamper-proof and easily verifiable system that reduces the reliance on centralized authorities for identity verification. In addition, the smart contracts for user authentication have been implemented through solidity programming and the security strength of the proposed protocol is verified through a formal verification tool called AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications).