There has been tremendous growth in low-power mobile wireless network devices in recent years. With that growth has come the need for a secure roaming authentication scheme for these devices, so that mobile users can seamlessly and securely access services.

Wu et al. review two earlier schemes for mobile authentication and discuss the problems with them, before moving on to explain their proposed alternative. They introduce the main issues associated with authentication for mobile devices, security and anonymity, and describe each of the two earlier schemes in more detail. The main problem, they contend, is that these earlier schemes impose a high computational processing load on the mobile device, making implementation of the scheme impractical.

The authors describe their alternative in detail and claim that the efficiency of their lightweight authentication scheme makes it a practical solution that still maintains security and anonymity. A simple table near the end of the paper neatly compares various attributes of the authors’ solution to the alternatives. A good list of references is included. While the theory included in the paper supports the assertions, it will be interesting to see if any of these schemes are actually accepted for implementation by manufacturers.

I recommend this interesting paper on a rapidly growing and important area in our increasingly mobile world.