An improved authenticated key agreement protocol for low power networks

Abstract

Providing fast and robust mutual authentication and key establishment for wireless networks was a priority for the security researchers in the last years. In this paper, an improved Elliptic Curve based Fast and Secure Authenticated Key Agreement (FS-AKA) protocol is presented. All the essential security services are provided by the proposed protocol. In addition, it is quick and light since it reduces the computational load (number of exponentiations and hash functions), therefore, it is suitable to low power networks and real time applications. The proposed protocol ensures also an excellent robustness against the famous attacks. In other words, the FS-AKA achieves a compromise between the robustness and the rapidity. The power of this new protocol is the high performance enhancement in terms of computational and communication load, compared with the known key agreement protocols.