A secure and efficient mutual authentication scheme for session initiation protocol

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the core signaling protocol for multimedia services is receiving much attention. Authentication is becoming increasingly crucial issue when a user asks to use SIP services. Many authentication schemes for the SIP have been proposed. Very recently, Zhang et al. has presented an authentication scheme for SIP and claimed their scheme could overcome various attacks while maintaining efficiency. In this research, we illustrate that their scheme is susceptible to the insider attack and does not provide proper mutual authentication. We then propose a modified secure mutual authentication scheme to conquer the security flaws in Zhang et al.’s scheme. Through the informal and formal security analyses, we demonstrate that our scheme is resilient possible known attacks including the attacks found in Zhang et al.’s scheme. In addition, the performance analysis shows that our scheme has better efficiency in comparison with other related ECC-based authentication schemes for SIP.