Mobile services access and payment through reusable tickets

Third-generation mobile systems (3G) such as Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS) bring mobile users a broad range of new value-added services (VASs). For mobile access across multiple service domains, the traditional access mechanisms require the exchange of authentication information between the home domain and the foreign domain using roaming agreements. This requirement involves complicated and expensive authentication activities in large scale mobile networks. This paper proposes a lightweight service access mechanism in which the computation complexity is low on the mobile device and the ticket can be reused. It introduces two hash chains: an authentication chain and a payment chain. The authentication chain allows a ticket to be reused and achieves mutual authentication and non-repudiation. The payment chain is lightweight, practical and likely to avoid re-initialization. Security analysis and comparison with related works indicate that our proposal is more appropriate for mobile communication networks.