A novel user authentication and privacy preserving scheme with smart cards for wireless communications

In recent years, several user authentication schemes with smart cards for wireless communication environments have been proposed. In 2010, He, Ma, Zhang, Chen, and Bu proposed a strong user authentication scheme with an anonymity property and key agreement for wireless networks. However, in this paper, it is demonstrated that the so-called secure, anonymous user authentication scheme introduced by He et al. is vulnerable to eavesdropping attack and is not practical for real-life implementation. We show that user anonymity of their scheme is not achieved, the user has to bear in mind a long identity (128 bit) during the login phase, and there is no provision for fairness in the key agreement. To remedy these security weaknesses, we further propose a novel authentication scheme which is immune to various known types of attack and is more secure and practical for mobile wireless networking.