An efficient handover authentication scheme with privacy preservation for IEEE 802.16m network

IEEE 802.16m is now under consideration by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to become the International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-Advanced standard. However, seamless and secure handover is one of the most challenging issues. Taking as reference our previous work, this paper presents a privacy-preserving fast handover authentication scheme based on pseudonym for IEEE 802.16m network. Since Mobile Station (MS) only provides a pseudonym in the initial authentication phase and changes its pseudonym in each handover authentication phase, this can protect the MS's identity privacy and allow MS to be untraceable. Moreover, each pseudonym is corresponding to a credential ticket generated by the previous service Base Station (BS) using a multi-BS group key, thus MS and the target BS can easily accomplish mutual authentication. In addition, our theoretical analysis and simulation indicate that our scheme outperforms previously reported schemes in terms of computation and communication overhead.