Abstract
In terms of convenience requirements, mobility has been one of the most important services for pay-TV systems. In 2009, Yang and Chang proposed an authentication protocol for mobile devices using elliptic curves cryptography (ECC) and claimed that their mechanism is secure and efficient using in mobile pay-TV systems. In this paper, we demonstrate that their protocol still is insecure for authentication without password protection and performs inefficiently. Therefore, we offer an anonymous authentication protocol (AAP) to solve the performance issue and insecure risks. In addition, we present an analysis of our protocol to show that our protocol suits better for applications with higher security requirements and low power-consuming devices. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.