Abstract
Ubiquitous mobile computing is becoming easier and more attractive in this ambient technological Internet world. However, some portable devices such as Personal Digital Assistant (PDAs) and smart phones are still encountering inherent constraints of limited storages and computing resources. To alleviate this problem, we develop a cost-effective protocol, iATA to transfer ATA commands and data over TCP/IP network between mobile appliances and stationary servers. It provides mobile users a virtual storage platform which is physically resided at remote home or office. As communications are made through insecure Internet connections, security risks of adopting this service become a concern. There are many reported cases in the history where attackers masquerade as legitimate users, illegally access to network-based applications or systems by breaking through the poor authentication gates. In this paper, we propose a mutual authentication and secure session termination scheme as the first and last defense steps to combat identity thief and fraud threat in particular for iATA services. Random validation factors, large prime numbers, current timestamps, one-way hash functions and one-time session key are deployed accordingly in the scheme. Moreover, we employ the concept of hard factorization problem (HFP) in the termination phase to against fraud termination requests. Theoretical security analysis discussed in later section indicates the scheme supports mutual authentication and is robust against several attacks such as verifiers' impersonation, replay attack, denial-of-services (DoS) attack and so on.
