Lightweight and Energy-Efficient Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme with User Anonymity for Secure Communication in Global Mobility Networks

User authentication is an imperative security mechanism for recognizing legal roaming users. However, designing an expeditious anonymous-user authentication scheme in the global mobility networking (GLOMONET) environment is always a challenging task. Because, due to the broadcast nature of the wireless channels, wireless networks are often susceptible to various attacks and mobile devices powered by batteries that have limited communication, processing, and storage capabilities. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, secure, and an expeditious authentication scheme, which can preserve the user anonymity for roaming services in GLOMONET. In this regard, we use the low-cost cryptographic primitives such as one-way hash functions and exclusive-or operations to accomplish goals, which is more suitable for battery-powered mobile devices. Although some authentication protocols for GLOMONET security have already been proposed, however, they are unable to achieve the desired imperative security properties, such as anonymity, privacy against eavesdroppers, communication security, etc. As a consequence of that, they are vulnerable to various security issues. Security and performance analyses show that our proposed scheme is secure and even more efficient, as compared with other related authentication schemes in GLOMONET.