Enhancing of a Password-Based Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

In 2005, Lee et al. proposed a secure smart card based remote user authentication scheme to improve the security of Chien et al.'s scheme. More recently, Sood et al. pointed out that Lee et al.'s scheme is still vulnerable to the reflection attack, off-line password guessing attack, user impersonation attack and fails to preserve user anonymity. Consequently, Sood et al. proposed a more secure remote user authentication scheme, which is an improvement over Lee et al.'s scheme to overcome their security drawbacks. In this study, however, we find that Sood et al.'s scheme still cannot achieve the claimed security and report its following flaws: (1) It fails to preserve user anonymity under their non-tamper resistance assumption of the smart card; (2) It cannot withstand stolen-verifier attack. The proposed cryptanalysis discourages any use of the scheme for practical applications.

사용자 인증 스킴은 개방된 통신환경에서 원격지에 있는 사용자가 서버에 로긴할 때 정당한 사용자 인지를 확인하는 것이다. 2005년 Liao등은 스마트 카드를 이용해서 사용자의 익명성을 보장하는 사용자 인증 스킴을 제안하였다. 최근 Yoon등은 Liao가 제안한 사용자 인증 스킴의 안전성 분석을 수행한 후 그 스킴에 존재하는 결점을 보완하는 향상된 스킴을 제안하였다. 그러나 안타깝게도 그들이 제안한 스킴은 사용자가 서버를 인증하는 방식과 서버가 사용자를 인증 방식을 모두 수행할 수 없고 패스워드의 안전성에도 문제점이 존재한다. 이러한 문제점을 이 논문에서는 서버 가장 공격, 사용자 가장 공격, 오프라인 사전공격을 수행하여 지적하였다. 아울러 본 논문에서는 Yoon등이 제안한 논문의 취약점을 제거하여 보다 안전한 사용자 인증 스킴을 제안하였다. A remote user authentication scheme is a two-party protocol whereby an authentication server in a distributed system confirms the identity of a remote individual logging on to the server over an untrusted, open network. In 2005, Liao et al. proposed a remote user authentication scheme using a smart card, in which users can be authenticated anonymously. Recently, Yoon et al. have discovered some security flaws in Liao et al.'s authentication scheme and proposed an improved version of this scheme to fix the security flaws. In this article, we review the improved authentication scheme by Yoon et al. and provide a security analysis on the scheme. Our analysis shows that Yoon et al.'s scheme does not guarantee not only any kind of authentication, either server-to-user authentication or user-to-server authentication but also password security. The contribution of the current work is to demonstrate these by mounting two attacks, a server impersonation attack and a user impersonation attack, and an off-line dictionary attack on Yoon et al.'s scheme. In addition, we propose the enhanced authentication scheme that eliminates the security vulnerabilities of Yoon et al.'s scheme.

A remote user authentication scheme is a two-party protocol whereby an authentication server in a distributed system confirms the identity of a remote individual logging on to the server over an untrusted, open network. Recently, Lee et al. have proposed an efficient nonce-based scheme for remote user authentication using smart cards. This work reviews Lee et al.'s authentication scheme and provides a security analysis on the scheme. Our analysis shows that Lee et al.'s scheme does not achieve its basic aim of authenticating remote users and furthermore has a very hazardous method for changing passwords. In addition, we recommend some changes to the scheme so that it can attain at least its main security goal.

Agent technology is emerging as a new software paradigm in the areas of distributed computing. The use of multiple agents is a common technique in agent-based systems. In distributed agent systems, for secure communication, the communicating agents should authenticate each other by using authentication protocols. A remote agent authentication scheme is a two-party protocol whereby an authentication server in a distributed system confirms the identity of a remote individual logging on to the server over an untrusted, open network. This paper discusses the security of Yoon et al.'s remote agent authentication scheme making use of smart cards. Yoon et al.'s scheme was proposed to solve the security problem with Hwang et al.'s authentication scheme and was claimed to provide mutual authentication between the server and the remote agent. But, unlike the claim, in Yoon et al.'s scheme, if an attacker steals some agent's smart card and extracts the information stored in the smart card, he/she can violate the authentication goal of the scheme without knowing the agent's password. We show this by mounting two attacks, a agent impersonation attack and a sever impersonation attack, on Yoon et al's scheme. In addition, in Yoon et al.'s scheme, if an attacker steals some agent's smart card and extracts the information stored in the smart card and reads Ui's login massage, he/she can violate its fundamental goal of a password security. We show this by mounting a dictionary attack on Yoon et al.'s scheme and also figure out what has gone wrong with the scheme.

As the technology of mobile devices spreads fast, the price of mobile devices is getting cheaper. Most of the people have mobile devices, and these devices have the technology of near field communication (NFC). With the long time development and research, the mobile devices use NFC technology on the payment and authentication applications, and replace the smartcard, the access control card, and the credit card by using the card emulation mode. It helps the development of NFC applications. In recent years, more and more users begin using NFC technology on mobile payment and authentication. Many researches have proposed the related NFC authentication protocols, but their schemes are still lack of some security properties and functions, which are necessary for NFC authentication protocols. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient NFC authentication scheme between two NFC devices by the help of the authentication server that provides mutual authentication.

Remote user authentication is a mechanism in which the remote server verifies the legitimacy of a user over an insecure communication channel. Password based authentication schemes have been widely deployed to verify the legitimacy of remote users as password authentication is one of the simplest and the most convenient authentication mechanism over insecure networks. In remote user authentication scheme, the user is assigned a smart card, which is being personalized by some parameters and provide the legal users to use the resources of the remote system. Until now, there have been ample of remote user authentication schemes published in the literature and each published schemes have its own merits and demerits. Recently, many schemes proposed are based on the one-way hash function. The computational complexity of their schemes is superior to the discrete logarithm-problem-based schemes. In our paper, we have defined all the security requirements and the goals. An ideal password authentication schemes should satisfy and achieve all of these. We have presented the results of our survey through five of the currently available secure one way hash function based remote user authentication schemes. We hope an ideal smart card (not storing (ID i ,PW i ), which meets all the security requirements and achieves all the goals can be developed.

In 2005, Yoon et al. proposed a user-friendly remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. The security of their scheme is based on one-way hash function and they claimed that their scheme is secured from attacks and achievable for proving mutual authentication, freely choosing password, no verification tables, and involving very lightweight hashing operations. However, we find that Yoon et al.'s scheme suffers from the denial of service attack and performs only unilateral authentication (only user authentication). In this paper we consequently propose an enhanced version to eliminate the vulnerability. Furthermore, our enhanced scheme can also provide mutual authentication and key agreement between a remote server and login users.

Password as an easy-to-remember credential plays an important role in remote user authentication schemes, while drawing from a space so small that an adversary may exhaustively search all possible candidate passwords to guess the correct one. In order to enhance the security of the password authentication scheme, smart card is introduced as the second factor to construct two-factor authentication scheme. However, we find out that two latest smart-card-based password authentication schemes are vulnerable to offline password guessing attacks under the definition of secure two-factor authentication. Furthermore, in order to show the serious consequence of offline password guessing attacks, we illustrate that the password compromise impersonation attacks as further threats are effective to break down the authentication schemes. Finally, we conclude the reasons why these weaknesses exist and present our improved ideas to avoid these problems in the future.

We point out that Hsu's recent cryptanalysis of Sun's remote user authentication scheme is flawed. We also comment on Chien et. al's scheme and give more practical attacks than those presented by Hsu in the same paper.

In a remote user authentication scheme, a remote server verifies whether a login user is genuine and trustworthy. Several remote user authentication schemes using the password, the biometrics and the smart card have been proposed in the literature. In 2012, Sonwanshi et al. proposed a password-based remote user authentication scheme using smart card, which uses the hash function and bitwise XOR operation. Their scheme is very efficient because of the usage of efficient one-way hash function and bitwise XOR operations. They claimed that their scheme is secure against several known attacks. Unfortunately, in this paper we find that their scheme has several vulnerabilities including the offline password guessing attack and stolen smart card attack. In addition, we show that their scheme fails to protect strong replay attack.

A robust anonymous biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards

Mutual authentication has been widely used to verify the legal user and server over a common communication channel. To ensure secure connection between user and server, a large number of remote mutual authentication schemes for multi-server have been proposed by researchers. However, there is a common feature that the identity of user is static in the login phase, which may leak some information of user. Therefore, a good deal of smart card based anonymous multi-server remote user authentication scheme have been proposed to overcome this problem. Recently, Banerjee et al. pointed out that Li et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to user impersonates attack and stolen smart card attack. Later, they proposed an improved protocol to fix this problem. However, we found that Banerjee et al.’s scheme is still vulnerable to user impersonation attack and off-line password guessing attack. Finally, we proposed an enhanced scheme to eliminate the security vulnerability.

An ID-based remote mutual authentication with key agreement scheme for mobile devices on elliptic curve cryptosystem

There are many remote user authentication schemes proposed in literatures for preventing unauthorized parties from accessing resources in an insecure environment. Due to inherent tamper-resistance, most of them are based on smart card authentication schemes. Unfortunately, the cost of cards and readers make these schemes costly. In the real world, common storage devices, such as universal serial bus (USB) thumb drives, portable HDDs, mobile phones, Laptop or Desktop PCs, are widely used, and they are much cheaper or more convenient for storing user authentication information. However, since these devices do not provide tamper-resistance, it is a challenge to design a secure authentication scheme using these kinds of memory devices. In this paper, we will propose a secure password-based remote user authentication and key agreement scheme without using smart cards. According to our analysis, the proposed scheme guarantees mutual authentication and also resists off-line dictionary, replay, forgery, and impersonation attacks. Compared to related scheme, the proposed scheme’s computation cost is lower and the total message length is shorter. Therefore, our scheme is suitable even for applications in limited power computing environments.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.41.1.975

A rise of prevalence ageing population and chronic diseases in Saudi Arabia, patients need to be regular face-to-face meet Doctors/physicians for consultation and treatment. Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS) enables patients to gain remote access their medical information and medical services. Patient authentication and privacy-preserving have become more challenging. Recently, some biometric based remote user authentication schemes using smart cards for TMIS have been proposed. The schemes are not secure against the tampering and theft by way of a stored biometric template, privilege insider attack, and stolen/lost the smart card. Furthermore, these schemes have computation and communication costs overruns. This paper presents an improved efficient and secure biometric remote user authentication scheme with renewability and anonymity has been proposed to remedy the weakness of these schemes. The security analysis and performance comparison of the proposed scheme is formally given and showed the advantages over these schemes.