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Passport/Visa Authentication Protocols for Ubiquitous Wireless Communications

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Abstract—The development in mobile devices and wireless technologies opens up unlimited choices of mobile services such as mobile commerce. These advances make access services available and convenient everywhere at any time. Since mobile users usually move, accessing services becomes unavailable especially in some locations that are not covered by their home networks. Therefore, it becomes necessary to roam into foreign networks in order to access such services. However, authenticating visiting users by a foreign network results in some security concerns. This challenge lies in the fact that a foreign network provider does not initially have the authentication credentials of the mobile users. The existing approaches are either roaming …show more content…

MUs always ask for a higher speed at a lower cost, and demand to be “Always Best Connected” [2]. However, due to the differences in wireless technologies, it is hard to achieve both high data rate and wide coverage at once. Moreover, different technologies sometimes are operated by multiple network providers. As a result, ubiquitous wireless network is not feasible with a single technology and a single wireless provider. That makes a MU always in need to connect to different types of technologies and service providers depending on his/her location and the target speed. However, there are some security concerns raised from the MU and foreign network (FN) perspectives as they cannot establish a connection without being authentic to each other. The traditional solution to such a problem is to have a roaming agreement between the home network (HN) and FN for verification process. Fig.1 illustrates the problem.

Roaming agreement-free challenge.
Problem Statement. A key challenge in such a heterogeneous networks environment is the possibility of roaming to administrative domains without a pre-established roaming agreement with a MU’s home domain [3]. In other words, authenticating unknown users by FN providers and preventing unauthorised access are critical concerns.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. It starts with a review of existing approaches to the problem (Section 2). This will be followed by an overview of the

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