A Threshold Multi-server Protocol for Password-Based Authentication

Multi-server authentication, being a crucial component of remote communication, provides the ease of one-time registration to users from a centralized registration authority. Therefore, the users could avail the offered services after getting authenticated of any service provider using the same registration credentials. In recent years, many multi-server authentication protocols have been demonstrated. Nonetheless, the existing schemes do not meet the security and efficiency requirements of the time. Recently, Chuang et al. presented a multi-server biometric authentication protocol which was later crypt-analysed and improved by Lin et al. with the identification of few attacks. Later, we discover that Lin et al.’s protocol is still prone to replay attack, privileged insider attack, trace attack, de-synchronization attack and key-compromise impersonation attacks. In this study, we present a multi-server authentication protocol which is not only comparable with Lin et al.’s scheme but also efficient than other state-of-the-art multi-server protocols. The security properties of our scheme are proved using formal analysis and evaluated with automated verification tool based on ProVerif.

This paper proposes a password-based authentication protocol suitable to certification through trustless network or key exchange. While the existing password-base protocols certify users through certification authority (CA) between client and server, in the proposed protocol of this paper, the users and the server exchange keys and perform authentication without the help of CA. To ameliorate the drawback of password-based protocols caused by the short length and randomness of password, the proposed protocol uses the signature techniques of ECDSA and the SRP protocol based on Diffie-Hellman key exchange method.

The concept of two-factor multiserver authentication protocol was developed to avoid multiple number of registrations using multiple smart-cards and passwords. Recently, a variety of two-factor multiserver authentication protocols have been developed. It is observed that the existing RSA-based multiserver authentication protocols are not suitable in terms of computation complexities and security attacks. To provide lower complexities and security resilience against known attacks, this article proposes a two-factor (password and smart-card) user authentication protocol with the RSA cryptosystem for multiserver environments. The comprehensive security discussion proved that the known security attacks are eliminated in our protocol. Besides, our protocol supports session key agreement and mutual authentication between the application server and the user. We analyze the proof of correctness of the mutual authentication and freshness of session key using the BAN logic model. The experimental outcomes obtained through simulation of the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) S/W show that our protocol is secured. We consider the computation, communication, and storage costs and the comparative explanations show that our protocol is flexible and efficient compared with protocols. In addition, our protocol offers security resilience against known attacks and provides lower computation complexities than existing protocols. Additionally, the protocol offers password change facility to the authorized user.

With the increasing and diversified Internet of Things (IoT) devices, more IoT heterogeneous wireless networks have emerged, providing more network services for IoT devices, especially mobile phones and other roaming devices. However, there are also some malicious users who use different means to attack the security of the network, so that more users begin to pay attention to the identity authentication and privacy protection of the Internet of Things. This paper designs an IoT node roaming authentication model, which is used to enhance the security authentication capability of the Internet of Things to roaming devices. In order to effectively prevent malicious nodes from connecting to the network, this paper proposes a roaming authentication protocol based on heterogeneous fusion mechanism (HFM-IoT). The authentication protocol uses the remote authentication server in the local and remote areas to perform interactive authentication on the roaming device, which increases the difficulty of attacking or infecting multiple network areas by malicious nodes. According to the security analysis, the protocol can protect against multiple network attacks, and it can be seen from the experimental simulation results that the protocol has lower energy burden and authentication delay.

Hadoop framework has been evolved to manage big data in cloud. Hadoop distributed file system and MapReduce, the vital components of this framework, provide scalable and fault-tolerant big data storage and processing services at a lower cost. However, Hadoop does not provide any robust authentication mechanism for principals’ authentication. In fact, the existing state-of-the-art authentication protocols are vulnerable to various security threats, such as man-in-the-middle, replay, password guessing, stolen-verifier, privileged-insider, identity compromization, impersonation, denial-of-service, online/off-line dictionary, chosen plaintext, workstation compromization, and server-side compromisation attacks. Beside these threats, the state-of-the-art mechanisms lack to address the server-side data integrity and confidentiality issues. In addition to this, most of the existing authentication protocols follow a single-server-based user authentication strategy, which, in fact, originates single point of failure and single point of vulnerability issues. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant authentication protocol suitable for the Hadoop framework, which is called the efficient authentication protocol for Hadoop (HEAP). HEAP alleviates the major issues of the existing state-of-the-art authentication mechanisms, namely operating-system-based authentication, password-based approach, and delegated token-based schemes, respectively, which are presently deployed in Hadoop. HEAP follows two-server-based authentication mechanism. HEAP authenticates the principal based on digital signature generation and verification strategy utilizing both advanced encryption standard and elliptic curve cryptography. The security analysis using both the formal security using the broadly accepted real-or-random (ROR) model and the informal (non-mathematical) security shows that HEAP protects several well-known attacks. In addition, the formal security verification using the widely used automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications ensures that HEAP is resilient against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Finally, the performance study contemplates that the overheads incurred in HEAP is reasonable and is also comparable to that of other existing state-of-the-art authentication protocols. High security along with comparable overheads makes HEAP to be robust and practical for a secure access to the big data storage and processing services.

The design of secure authentication protocols is quite challenging, considering that various kinds of root kits reside in Personal Computers (PCs) to observe user's behavior and to make PCs untrusted devices. Involving human in authentication protocols, while promising, is not easy because of their limited capability of computation and memorization. Therefore, relying on users to enhance security necessarily degrades the usability. On the other hand, relaxing assumptions and rigorous security design to improve the user experience can lead to security breaches that can harm the users' trust. In this paper, we demonstrate how careful visualization design can enhance not only the security but also the usability of authentication. To that end, we propose two visual authentication protocols: one is a one-time-password protocol, and the other is a password-based authentication protocol. Through rigorous analysis, we verify that our protocols are immune to many of the challenging authentication attacks applicable in the literature. Furthermore, using an extensive case study on a prototype of our protocols, we highlight the potential of our approach for real-world deployment: we were able to achieve a high level of usability while satisfying stringent security requirements.

Multiserver authentication requires users to have only one-time registration for accessing different permissible services securely from various servers over an insecure network. To date, many multiserver authentication protocols have been presented in the literature. Most of them require the registration server’s participation at the time of authentication, leading to increased communication overhead and bandwidth overload of the registration server. Recently, Lee et al. introduced a multiserver authentication protocol using extended chaotic maps that permits registered users and servers to authenticate with each other directly. In this paper, we revisit Lee et al.’s protocol and find that it is insecure against user impersonation and session-specific temporary information attacks. Additionally, the protocol uses timestamps, which may cause serious time synchronization problems. The weaknesses of Lee et al.’s protocol prompted us to propose another protocol based on extended chaotic maps, which is free from serious time synchronization problems, more efficient in terms of computation and communication overheads, and more robust against all known attacks. Furthermore, our protocol adds extra functionality features such as considering the users’ registration expiration, server scalability, and inclusion of two new phases: a deregistration phase and a registration renewal phase for a registered user. Our protocol’s security has been validated using the automated tool ProVerif and proven through formal and informal analyses. With better security protection, fewer complexities, and additional features, the proposed protocol is more suitable for practical use than other related protocols.

Authentication and key agreement (AKA) provides flexible and convenient sercices. Most traditional AKA protocols are designed to apply in single-server environment, where a user has to register at different servers to access different types of network services and the user have to remember or manage a large number of usernames and passwords. Later, multi-server AKA protocols resolve the repeated registration problem of single-server AKA protocols, where a user can access different servers to get different services using a single registration and the same username and password. Recently, in 2015, Lu et al proposed a light-weight ID based authentication and key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture, referred to as LAKA protocol. They claimed their protocol can overcome all shortcomings which existed in Xue et al’s protocol. Unfortunately, our further research shows that LAKA protocol still suffers from server spoofing attack, stolen smart card attack etc. To overcome the weakness of LAKA protocol, an energy-efficient and lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture is proposed (abbreviated to ELAKA). The ELAKA protocol not only provides the security features declared by LAKA protocol, but also has some other advantages. First, the ELAKA protocol can realize authentication and key agreement just by three handshakes with extremely low communication cost and computation cost between users and servers, which can achieve a delicate balance of security and performance. Second, ELAKA protocol can enable the user enjoy the remote services with privacy protection. Finally the ELAKA protocol is proved secure against known possible attacks by using BAN logic. As a result, these features make ELAKA protocol is very suitable for computation-limited mobile devices (such as smartphone, PAD, tablets) in comparison to other related existing protocols.

With the rapid growth of wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) based healthcare applications, protecting both the privacy and security from illegitimate users, are major concern issues since patient’s precise information is vital for the proper diagnosis procedure. So, authentication protocol is one of the efficient mechanisms to deal with trustworthy and authentic users. Several authentication protocols have been proposed in WMSNs environment. However, the most of these protocols are so susceptible to security threats and not suitable for practical use. In this article, recently proposed Amin et al.’s authentication scheme is reviewed and some vulnerabilities like off-line password guessing attack, user impersonation attack, known session-key temporary information attack, the revelation of secret parameters, and identity guessing attack are pointed out. To overcome all the above mentioned vulnerabilities, we have proposed an enhanced three-factor based remote user authentication protocol in WMSNs environment. Further, the proposed protocol is validated using Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic and then simulated using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. Moreover, the security analysis ensures that the proposed protocol is well protected from various types of malicious attacks. In addition, the performance evaluation shows better efficiency and suitability of our protocol over other related protocols.

The authentication system plays a crucial role in the context of GLObal MObility NETwork (GLOMONET) where Mobile User (MU) often need to seamless and secure roaming service over multiple Foreign Agents (FA). However, designing a robust and anonymous authentication protocol along with a user privacy is essential and challenging task. Due to the resource constrained property of mobile terminals, the broadcast nature of a wireless channel, mobility environments are frequently exposed to several attacks. Many researchers focus their interests on designing an efficient and secure mobile user authentication protocol for mobility networks. Very recently (in 2018), Xu et al presented the novel anonymous authentication system for roaming in GLOMONET, and insisted that their protocol is more secure than existing authentication protocols. The security strength of Xu et al.’s authentication protocol is analysed and identified that the protocol is vulnerable to stolen verifier attack, privileged insider attack, impersonation attack and denial of service attack. In-fact, the protocol suffers from clock synchronization problem and cannot afford local password-verification to detect wrong passwords quickly. As a remedy, we proposed an efficient and robust anonymous authentication protocol for mobility networks. The proposed mobile user authentication protocol achieves the provable security and has the ability to resist against numerous network attacks. Besides, the correctness of the novel authentication protocol is validated using formal security tool called AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols & Applications). Finally, the performance analysis and simulation results reveals that the proposed authentication protocol is computationally efficient and practically implementable in resource limited mobility environments.

Adaptive user authentication policies are moving in the center of attention lately aiming to assist users in creating memorable and secure passwords. Focusing on graphical user authentication, state-of-the-art research has provided evidence that image-related attributes affect password memorability and security. Nonetheless, the effects of users' contemporary cultural-related memories towards password memorability and security have not been investigated so far, although it is known that user authentication is a cross-cultural task. Aiming to shed light on whether such effects exist, we conducted a study in which users created a graphical password with a contemporary culture-intensive vs. a culture-neutral image. Results indicate that image content related to one's cultural-related memories affects the interaction behavior during password composition, and consequently password memorability. Findings point towards a promising new direction for considering human contemporary cultural memories in the design of adaptive password policies to increase memorability and preserve security.

A secure light weight scheme for user authentication and key agreement in multi-gateway based wireless sensor networks

In an internet environment, such as UNIX, a remote user has to obtain the access right from a server before doing any job.The procedure of obtaining acess right is called a user authentication protocol.User authentication via user memorable password provides convenience without needing any auxiliary devices, such as smart card.A user authentication protocol via username and password should basically withstand the off-line password guessing attack, the stolen verifier attack, and the DoS attack.Recently, Peyravian and Zunic proposed one password transmission protocol and one password change protocol.Later, Tseng et al. (2001) pointed out that Peyravian and Zunic's protocols can not withstand the off-line password guessing attack, and therefore proposed an improved protocol to defeat the attack.Independently, Hwang and Yeh also showed that Peyravian and Zunic's protocols suffer from some secury flaws, and an improved protocol was also presented.In this paper, we show that both Peyravian and Zunic's protocols and Tseng et al.'s improved protocol are insecure against the stolen verifier attack.Moreover, we show that all Peyravian and Zunic's, Tseng et al.'s, and Hwang and Yeh's protocols are insecure against DoS attack.

Regulating illegal activities in cyberspace to balance user privacy and cyberspace governance has been a non-trivial challenge when designing anonymous authentication solutions. For example, while several existing anonymous authentication protocols support accountability, they either risk leaking users' private keys or incur significant overhead for accountability in each ongoing authentication, including in cloud service-based authentication schemes. Seeking to address these limitations, this paper proposes an auditable anonymous user authentication (A2UA) protocol based on blockchain for cloud services. The A2UA protocol mainly employs bilinear pairing, partial authentication factors, dynamic credits and fake-public keys (FPKs) to achieve anonymous mutual authentication between users and cloud service providers, and applies ring signature and blockchain to accomplish two-level accountability while maintaining user privacy. Our analysis results show that the A2UA protocol outperforms several other existing schemes in terms of security, computation and communication costs as well as security and privacy features. Additionally, it has good feasibility in terms of the Ethereum Gas cost as demonstrated in our evaluation.

Currently, smart card based remote user authentication schemes have been widely adopted due to their low cost and convenient portability. With the purpose of using various different internet services with single registration and to protect the users from being tracked, various dynamic ID based multi-server authentication protocols have been proposed. Recently, Li et al. proposed an efficient and secure dynamic ID based authentication protocol using smart cards. They claimed that their protocol provides strong security. In this paper, we have demonstrated that Li et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to replay attack, denial of service attack, smart card lost attack, eavesdropping attack and server spoofing attacks.