Handover authentication is a critical issue in wireless networks, which is being used to ensure mobile nodes wander over multiple access points securely and seamlessly. A variety of handover authentication schemes for wireless networks have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, existing handover authentication schemes are vulnerable to a few security attacks, or incur high communication and computation costs. Recently, He et al. proposed a handover authentication scheme PairHand and claimed it can resist various attacks without rigorous security proofs. In this paper, we show that PairHand does not meet forward secrecy and strong anonymity. More seriously, it is vulnerable to key compromise attack, where an adversary can recover the private key of any mobile node. Then, we propose a new efficient and provably secure handover authentication scheme for wireless networks based on elliptic curve cryptography. Compared with existing schemes, our proposed scheme can resist key compromise attack, and achieves forward secrecy and strong anonymity. Moreover, it is more efficient in terms of computation and communication.
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