Analysis and Improvement of a NTRU-Based Handover Authentication Scheme

Recently, Chen and Peng proposed a NTRU-based handover authentication scheme for wireless networks, aiming to provide a quantum-resistant solution with low complexity. Unfortunately, we find that there may exist an inside attack against their scheme. Specifically, in their scheme any mobile node or access point can recover the authentication server’s long-term secret. Since this secret plays a vital role in Chen and Peng’s scheme, any one with this secret can impersonate the authentication server. Fortunately, we have come up with a simple and efficient solution to thwart the proposed attack, which can maintain all the features of the original protocol while incurring little additional communication and computational costs.