A secure and efficient three-factor authentication protocol in global mobility networks

With the developments in communication and mobile technologies, mobile users can access roaming services by utilizing a mobile device at any time and any place in the global mobility networks. However, these require several security requirements, such as authentication and anonymity, because the information is transmitted over an open channel. Thus, secure and efficient authentication protocols are essential to provide secure roaming services for legitimate users. In 2018, Madhusudhan et al. presented a secure authentication protocol for global mobile networks. However, we demonstrated that their protocol could not prevent potential attacks, including masquerade, session key disclosure, and replay attacks. Thus, we proposed a secure and efficient three-factor authentication protocol to overcome the security weaknesses of Madhusudhan et al.'s scheme. The proposed scheme was demonstrated to prevent various attacks and provided a secure mutual authentication by utilizing biometrics and secret parameters. We evaluated the security of the proposed protocol using informal security analysis and formal security analysis, such as the real-or-random (ROR) model and Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic. In addition, we showed that our scheme withstands man-in-the-middle (MITM) and replay attacks utilizing formal security validation automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) simulation. Finally, we compared the performance of our protocol with existing schemes. Consequently, our scheme ensured better security and efficiency features than existing schemes and can be suitable for resource-constrained mobile environments.