One-to-many authentication for access control in mobile pay-TV systems

In traditional authentication schemes for access control in mobile pay-TV systems, one-to-one delivery is used, i.e., one authentication message per request is delivered from a head-end system (HES) to a subscriber. The performance of one-to-one delivery for authentication is not satisfactory as it requires frequent operations which results in high bandwidth consumption. To address this issue, one-to-many authentication for access control in mobile pay-TV systems was developed. It requires only one broadcasted authentication message from a HES to subscribers if there are many requests for the same service in a short period of time. However, later it was revealed that the one-to-many authentication scheme was vulnerable to an impersonation attack, i.e., an attacker without any secret key could not only impersonate the mobile set (MS) to the HES but also impersonate the HES to the MS. Then, a new scheme has been recently introduced for secure operations of one-to-many authentication. However, as shown in this paper, the recent work for one-to-many authentication is still vulnerable to the impersonation attack. To mitigate this attack, in this paper, a new scheme for one-to-many authentication using bilinear pairing is proposed that eliminates security weaknesses in the previous work. Results obtained depict that the new improved scheme in this paper provides better performance in terms of computation and communication overheads.