Analysis of handover authentication protocols for mobile wireless networks using identity-based public key cryptography

The handover authentication protocol plays an important role in mobile wireless networks where mobile devices often need to securely and seamlessly roam among different access points. To satisfy various security and privacy requirements of practical wireless applications, many handover authentication protocols for mobile wireless networks have been proposed in the last decade. In particular, the handover authentication protocol using the Identity-based Public Key Cryptography (ID-based PKC) has better security and has attracted a lot of attention recently. Here, we discuss the security and privacy requirements of handover authentication protocols for mobile wireless networks and we present a brief review of handover authentication protocols using the ID-based PKC technique. Our security analysis shows that only one of the recent protocols proposed can satisfy all security and function requirements. We also implement and compare the communication and computation costs associated with these protocols on a specific mobile device.