A User Authentication Scheme Based on Elliptic Curves Cryptography for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Huifang Chen; Linlin Ge; Lei Xie

doi:10.3390/s150717057

A User Authentication Scheme Based on Elliptic Curves Cryptography for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Sensors (Basel). 2015 Jul 14;15(7):17057-75. doi: 10.3390/s150717057.

Authors

Huifang Chen^{1

2}, Linlin Ge³, Lei Xie^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. chenhf@zju.edu.cn.
² Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Network Technology, Hangzhou 310027, China. chenhf@zju.edu.cn.
³ Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. lynkeh13@zju.edu.cn.
⁴ Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. xiel@zju.edu.cn.
⁵ Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Network Technology, Hangzhou 310027, China. xiel@zju.edu.cn.

Abstract

The feature of non-infrastructure support in a wireless ad hoc network (WANET) makes it suffer from various attacks. Moreover, user authentication is the first safety barrier in a network. A mutual trust is achieved by a protocol which enables communicating parties to authenticate each other at the same time and to exchange session keys. For the resource-constrained WANET, an efficient and lightweight user authentication scheme is necessary. In this paper, we propose a user authentication scheme based on the self-certified public key system and elliptic curves cryptography for a WANET. Using the proposed scheme, an efficient two-way user authentication and secure session key agreement can be achieved. Security analysis shows that our proposed scheme is resilient to common known attacks. In addition, the performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme performs similar or better compared with some existing user authentication schemes.

Keywords: elliptic curves cryptography (ECC); self-certified public key (SCPK); session key agreement; user authentication; wireless ad hoc network (WANET).