A method for authentication and key exchange for seamless inter-domain handovers

With the rapid growth of the Internet and mobile wireless technologies, an ever-increasing requirement on securing services between mobile users and access networks has become especially important. When a user roams into a foreign network, in addition to data confidentiality, mutual authentication between the user and the provider is also a vital issue. These concerns and the desire to stay seamlessly connected lead to the demand of fast authentication and key establishment mechanisms, which are particularly difficult in inter-domain handover scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel mechanism to provide a simple but effective method, which forwards the key from the previous access router to the new access router that the mobile node attaches to. With this mechanism, trust relationship can be re-established even if the access routers do not trust each other in such an inter-domain scenario. Compared with the classical authentication method used in GSM and a recently proposed EAP-based secure key exchange protocol, our approach shows advantages of faster key exchange and authentication with only minimal message exchange in the wireless link.