A Review of Fast Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange in Mobile Communications

Abstract

Authentication plays an important role in the entire mobile network system and acts as the first defense
against attackers since it ensures the correctness of the identities of distributed communication entities before they
engage in any other communication activity. Many security mechanisms for mobile communications have been
introduced in the literature and these mechanisms poised several problems. Therefore, in order to provide security
service, an efficient and secure authentication scheme is urgently desired. Combining different authentication
techniques with other techniques, such as Time-Stamp based authentication and Nonce-based authentication
mechanism, has helped to address these problems and forms the basis of future research. The integrated techniques
can solve main contradictory problems more precisely. Review work of the literature, specifically that the research on
Time-Stamp based authentication, Nonce-based authentication and Nested One-Time secret mechanism, showed that
the said techniques have been widely and successfully implemented in several practical applications. This review work
provides an in-depth analysis of identifying and finding issues of strengths, weaknesses and outcomes of combined
authentication scheme.