A provably secure and efficient authentication scheme for access control in mobile pay-TV systems

To guarantee the secure access by authorized subscribers in mobile pay-TV systems, user authentication is required. User authentication is a security mechanism used to verify the identity of a legal subscriber. In 2012, Yeh and Tsaur proposed an authentication scheme for access control in mobile pay-TV systems to improve the Sun and Leu’s scheme. Yeh and Tsaur claimed that their scheme meets all security requirements for mobile pay-TV systems. However, this paper indicates that Yeh and Tsaur’s scheme suffers from some critical weaknesses. An attacker without knowing secret information can successfully impersonate both mobile sets and head-end system. As a remedy, we propose an improved authentication scheme for mobile pay-TV systems using bilinear pairings. The proposed scheme maintains the merits and covers the demerits of the previous schemes, and provides a higher level of the efficiency for mobile pay-TV systems.