A Study on Mobile IPv4 Authentication Mechanisms

With the proliferation of mobile terminals, use of the Internet in mobile environments is becoming more common. To support mobility in these terminals, Mobile IPv4 is proposed and represents the standard in IPv4 environments. Authentication should be mandatory, because mobile terminals can utilize Internet services in any foreign domain. Mobile IPv4 provides symmetric key based authentication using the default HMAC-MD5. However, symmetric key based authentication creates a key distribution problem. To solve this problem, public key based authentication mechanisms have been proposed. In this paper, the performance of each of these mechanisms is evaluated. The results present that, among these mechanisms, partial certificate based authentication has superior performance, and certificate based authentication has the worst performance. Although current public key based authentication mechanisms have lower performance than symmetric key based authentication, this paper presents the possibility that public key based authentication mechanisms may be used for future mobile terminal authentication.