Extended Security Analysis of Multi-Hop Ticket Based Handover Authentication Protocol in the 802.16j Network

Multi-hop and relay concepts have attracted a great deal of interest in 802.16j network, because relay can expand coverage and improve throughput. However, security handover in 802.16j is the main challenge. With the help of the relay station, the mobile station can authenticate with the target base station before the mobile station handovers to the target cell. This can reduce handover authentication delay significantly. In this paper, we propose a multi-hop handover authentication protocol based on ticket concept adopted from Kerberos. A mobile station, a relay station and a target base station can mutually authenticate each other using multi-hop method. The main task of this paper is formal analysis of our proposed authentication protocol. We extend the honest and ideal ideas in the strand space model to include message authentication code. This extended formal analysis model shows that our proposed protocol is secure. The confidentiality and authentication can be proved.