Efficient Authentication Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

It is evident from the past literature that in any authentication protocol there is a trade-off between efficiency and security. This paper aims to solve this problem in the domain of heterogeneous wireless networks, by proposing an efficient authentication protocol which operates in two modes namely full authentication and fast re-authentication. This paper proposes a protocol which mitigates the delay in authentication by reducing the number of message excahnges in full authentication procedure and reducing the number of authenticating parties in fast re-authentication procedure. This paper also used hash-chain technique to guarantee safety and freshness of the information. AVISPA (Autmated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) was used to formally analyse the security of the protocol. Some other existing authentication protocols were also analyzed and compared with our proposed protocol. Our analysis showed that the proposed authentication protocol is efficient while guaranteeing the security and improved performance of the heterogeneous wireless networks.