An Accountable, Privacy-Preserving, and Efficient Authentication Framework for Wireless Access Networks

The convergence of wireless access networks significantly changes the way we live and work, bringing us closer to the goal of computing anywhere at any time. Security, privacy, accountability, and efficiency issues are of most concern in the deployment of such networks. Despite the need and importance, little research has been conducted on designing accountable and privacy-preserving authentication schemes for wireless access networks, not to mention schemes that can simultaneously and efficiently provide accountability and privacy protection without involving any trusted third party. This motivates us to develop a novel authentication framework, namely APEA, that integrates a new key management protocol, i.e., an adapted construction of short group signature (SGS) and batch verification, as an effective approach to simultaneously achieve the four goals without involving any trusted third party. Experiments using our implementation on laptop PCs demonstrate that APEA is feasible in practice.