A Privacy Preserving Handover Authentication Scheme for EAP-Based Wireless Networks

Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is a framework which aims to provide a flexible authentication for wireless networks. Due to the involvement of an EAP server and several round trips between a mobile node (MN) and the EAP server, a full EAP authentication takes about 1000ms which is unacceptable in a handover process. This paper proposes a privacy preserving handover authentication scheme for EAP-based wireless networks. We use the proxy signature scheme to accomplish authentication between MN and an access point (AP) without involving the third party. The detailed security analysis shows that our scheme can achieve the privacy preserving and forward/backward security. In addition, we evaluate the latency performance of the proposed scheme by the analysis and simulation. The results demonstrate that our scheme is more efficient in terms of computation and communication overheads.