Abstract
Rapid advances in wireless communication technologies have paved the way for a wide range of mobile devices to become increasingly ubiquitous and popular. Mobile devices enable anytime, anywhere access to the Internet. The fast growth of many types of mobile services used by various users has made the traditional single-server architecture inefficient in terms of its functional requirements. To ensure the availability of various mobile services, there is a need to deploy multi-server architectures. To ensure the security of various mobile service applications, the anonymous mobile user authentication (AMUA) protocol without online registration using the self-certified public key cryptography (SCPKC) for multi-server architectures was proposed in the past. However, most of the past AMUA solutions suffer from malicious attacks or have unacceptable computation and communication costs. To address these drawbacks, we propose a new AMUA protocol that uses the SCPKC for multiserver architectures. In contrast to the existing AMUA protocols, our proposed AMUA protocol incurs lower computation and communication costs. By comparing with two of the latest AMUA protocols, the computation and the communication costs of our protocol are at least 74.93% and 37.43% lower than them, respectively. Moreover, the security analysis of our AMUA protocol demonstrates that it satisfies the security requirements in practical applications and is provably secure in the novel security model. By maintaining security at various levels, our AMUA protocol is more practical for various mobile applications.