A Secure Network Access Approach Based on Heterogeneous Key Exchange Protocol

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient and secure inner network access approach which is based on a heterogeneous Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol in an unsecured network. The inner and outer network structure is commonly applied in various areas, such as different departments of government, enterprises. As the wireless communication network boosts up, the users in outer network try to use PDA, smart phone to access the inner network to acquire necessary information. Due to the limitation of the storage and computational capability of these mobile terminals, traditional secure inner network access approach which uses special cable to do the access is not suitable for this case. Therefore, we design a heterogeneous key exchange protocol for the mobile terminal in outer network and application server in inner network to negotiate the communication shared key. The gateway between inner and outer network can be protected from the third party attack by the trusted computing. The experimental results show that the heterogeneous key exchange protocol is efficient and secure for inner network access.