LAUSR

Abstract To ensure secure and seamless handovers inter-Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN) is a key issue in LTE-A networks. Due to the introduction of Home Evolved NodeB (HeNB), there are three different access modes for the HeNB and the mobility scenarios between the eNB and the HeNB in LTE-A networks are rather complicated. Different handover procedures are executed for different mobility scenarios according to the 3GPP committee, which makes the overall system complex. Thus, it is a key point to propose a unified and secure handover scheme to fit in with all the mobility scenarios in LTE-A networks. In this paper, we propose a secure handover authentication scheme based on the certificateless signcryption technique. Our proposed scheme can achieve the unified and secure handover procedure without sacrificing efficiency. The security and performance evaluations demonstrate that our proposed scheme can meet various security requirements including the perfect forward/backward secrecy and privacy preserving. At the same time, our scheme achieves ideal efficiency.