An improved authenticated key agreement protocol with perfect forward secrecy for wireless mobile communication

Abstract

To provide secure communication for mobile devices, authenticated key agreement protocol is an important primitive for establishing session keys. However, most of the existing authenticated key agreement protocols are not designed for wireless mobile communication for which the bandwidth and the storage of the devices are limited. Also, mobile devices are more vulnerable to attack, providing forward secrecy would become an essential element in the protocol. In this paper, based on Seo and Sweeney's simple authenticated key agreement algorithm (SAKA), we develop an improved authenticated key agreement protocol that eliminates the disadvantages of SAKA and provides identity authentication, key validation, and perfect forward secrecy. Also, our protocol can foil man-in-the-middle attacks. We also show how our proposed protocol can be included in the current 3GPP2 specifications for OTASP to improve the A-Key (Authentication Key) distribution, which is the master key in IS-95 and CDMA2000 mobile networks. The proposed protocol requires significantly less bandwidth, and less computational and storage overhead while with higher security compared to 3GPP2 specifications. In fact, the proposed protocol can also be applied to other wireless communication scenarios. © 2005 IEEE.