Evaluation of Direct and Indirect Authentication Mechanisms in Mobile Networks

Abstract

The rapid progress in wireless mobile communication technology and personal communication systems has prompted new security questions.Typically,mobile networks are deployed in un-trusted environments. In mobile network there is unrestricted mobility and information access between unacquainted nodes and server occurs frequently from anywhere, anytime. In such conditions keeping the security and privacy of information from accessing illegally by any invalid user node is a big concern. The sharing of data and information between various parties from different locations through insecure channel is quite general. The vast majority of internet users are concerned about the safety of their secret information and personal details from being accessed by unauthorized entities. So, before sharing the secure and sensitive data, information and providing access to various resources, the identification of the intended or claimed entities is one of the major essential factors for any secure communication system. Crypto system is an important technique to identify the authenticity in order to protect the confidential and sensitive data in case of mobile networks. There are some direct and indirect authentication schemes that are based on different cryptographic systems such as RSA, ECC etc and some are based on the modified versions of Kerberos assisted authentication scheme.The selection of an efficient authentication scheme plays an important role in case of mobile networks where devices are resource constrained in nature. In this context, this study focuses on the implementation and analysis of computational cost of ECC based direct authentication, ECC based indirect authentication, RSA based direct authentication, RSA based indirect authentication, Kaman authentication mechanism and Chang Cheng's authentication mechanism so as to select the best authentication system for resource constrained devices in mobile network.