A novel mutual authentication and key agreement protocol based on NTRU cryptography for wireless communications

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present a novel mutual authentication and key agreement protocol based on the Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU) public key cryptography. The symmetric encryption hash and “challenge-response” techniques were adopted to build their protocol. To implement the mutual authentication and session key agreement, the proposed protocol contains two stages: namely initial procedure and real execution stage. Since the lightweight NTRU public key cryptography is employed, their protocol can not only overcome the security flaws of secret-key based authentication protocols such as those used in Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), but also provide greater security and lower computational complexity in comparison with currently well-known public key based wireless authentication schemes such as Beller-Yacobi and M. Aydos protocols.