Efficient Anonymous Key Exchange Protocol for Roaming in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Group signature schemes existentially provide anonymity, non-repudiation and can make a mobile device untraceable. But using group signature only in designing anonymous key exchange system is time wasting and consumes much of other computing resources hence the use of it must be minimal especially when deployed on resources-constrained mobile devices. In .this paper, we propose the combined use of group signature because of its inherent security properties which are very important when a mobile user roams in the insecure wireless network and message authentication code to reduce the huge computational burden occasioned by group signature’s expensive public key operations resulting in unbearable authentication latency. In this paper, we built two authenticators, a signature based authenticator and a message authentication code based authenticator. These models are based on the Canetti-Krawczyk model. We implemented the design using Java 8 on Android Studio 2.2 and tested it on Genymotion based emulator on Oracle VM VirtualBox. The experiment result showed a significant reduction in the authentication time when message authentication code based authenticator was executed compared to authentication time result in the group signature based authenticator. We further compared our model with a similar model and find that ours was superior in efficiency measured from authentication latency when a user roams from his home domain to a visited network and other networks subsequently while maintaining same security characteristics.