Two robust remote user authentication protocols using smart cards

With the rapid growth of electronic commerce and enormous demand from variants of Internet based applications, strong privacy protection and robust system security have become essential requirements for an authentication scheme or universal access control mechanism. In order to reduce implementation complexity and achieve computation efficiency, design issues for efficient and secure password based remote user authentication scheme have been extensively investigated by research community in these two decades. Recently, two well-designed password based authentication schemes using smart cards are introduced by Hsiang and Shih (2009) and Wang et al. (2009), respectively. Hsiang et al. proposed a static ID based authentication protocol and Wang et al. presented a dynamic ID based authentication scheme. The authors of both schemes claimed that their protocol delivers important security features and system functionalities, such as mutual authentication, data security, no verification table implementation, freedom on password selection, resistance against ID-theft attack, replay attack and insider attack, as well as computation efficiency. However, these two schemes still have much space for security enhancement. In this paper, we first demonstrate a series of vulnerabilities on these two schemes. Then, two enhanced protocols with corresponding remedies are proposed to eliminate all identified security flaws in both schemes.     

Analysis and design of a smart card based authentication protocol

Numerous smart card based authentication protocols have been proposed to provide strong system security and robust individual privacy for communication between parties these days. Nevertheless, most of them do not provide formal analysis proof, and the security robustness is doubtful. Chang and Cheng （2011） proposed an efficient remote authentication protocol with smart cards and claimed that their proposed protocol could support secure communication in a multi-server environment. Unfortunately, there are opportunities for security enhancement in current schemes. In this paper, we identify the major weakness, i.e., session key disclosure, of a recently published protocol. We consequently propose a novel authentication scheme for a multi-server envi- ronment and give formal analysis proofs for security guarantees.     

A secure user anonymity-preserving biometric-based multi-server authenticated key agreement scheme using smart cards

Advancement in communication technology provides a scalable platform for various services, where a remote user can access the server from anywhere without moving from its place. It provides a unique opportunity for online services such that a user does not need to be physically present at the service center. These services adopt authentication and key agreement protocols in order to ensure authorized and secure access to the resources. Most of the authentication schemes proposed in the literature support a single-server environment, where the user has to register with each server. If a user wishes to access multiple application servers, he/she requires to register with each server. The multi-server authentication introduces a scalable platform such that a user can interact with any server using single registration. Recently, Chuang and Chen proposed an efficient multi-server authenticated key agreement scheme based on a user’s password and biometrics (Chuang and Chen, 2014). Their scheme is a lightweight, which requires the computation of only hash functions. In this paper, we first analyze Chuang and Chen’s scheme and then identify that their scheme does not resist stolen smart card attack which causes the user’s impersonation attack and server spoofing attack. We also show that their scheme fails to protect denial-of-service attack. We aim to propose an efficient improvement on Chuang and Chen’s scheme to overcome the weaknesses of their scheme, while also retaining the original merits of their scheme. Through the rigorous informal and formal security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Chuang and Chen’s scheme. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. In addition, our scheme is comparable in terms of the communication and computational overheads with Chuang and Chen’s scheme and other related existing schemes.     

DoS-resistant ID-based password authentication scheme using smart cards

In this paper, we provide a defense mechanism to Kim-Lee-Yoo’s ID-based password authentication scheme, which is vulnerable to impersonation attacks and resource exhaustion attacks. Mutual authentication and communication privacy are regarded as essential requirements in today’s client/server-based architecture; therefore, a lightweight but secure mutual authentication method is introduced in the proposed scheme. Once the mutual authentication is successful, the session key will be established without any further computation. The proposed defense mechanism not only accomplishes the mutual authentication and the session key establishment, but also inherits the security advantages of Kim-Lee-Yoo’s scheme, e.g. it is secure against password guessing attacks and message replay attacks.     

一种改进的智能卡远程用户匿名认证方案

针对Sonwanshi提出的远程用户认证方案存在会话密钥安全性差、不能抵御扮演攻击和离线口令猜测攻击的缺陷,提出了一种改进方案,主要在注册和登录阶段增加了安全性能。在注册阶段,用户口令直接在智能卡内进行相应运算,不再提交给服务器。这不仅降低了服务器对口令存储、维护的开销,而且避免了服务器对用户的攻击,提高了安全性能。在登录阶段,采用随机数的挑战应答方式取代原方案的时间戳方式,消除了时钟不同步导致的认证失败。对原方案、改进方案和其他同类方案进行安全性和效率分析的结果表明,改进方案不仅弥补了原方案的缺陷,而且相对同类方案,降低了时间复杂度,适用于安全需求高、处理能力低的设备。     

On-siteDriverID: A secure authentication scheme based on Spanish eID cards for vehicular ad hoc networks

Security in Vehicle Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) has been a topic of interest since the origins of vehicular communications. Different approaches have been followed as new security threats have emerged in the last few years. The approach of conditional privacy has been widely used as it guarantees authentication among vehicles but not revealing their real identities. Although the real identity of a vehicle can be traced by the authorities, the process to do that is time consuming and typically involves several entities (for instance road authorities that request the identification, license plate records bodies, a judge to allow revealing the identity associated to a license plate…). Moreover, this process is always subsequent to the detection of a road situation that requires knowing the real vehicle identities. However, in vehicular scenarios, authorities would beneficiate from knowing the real drivers’ identity in advance. We propose in this paper On-SiteDriverID, a secure protocol and its application which allows authorities’ vehicles to obtain drivers’ real identities rapidly and on demand on VANET scenarios. Thus, authorities would be able to gather information about drivers and vehicles, allowing them to act in a safer and better manner in situations such as traffic control duties or emergencies. The obtained simulation results in real VANET scenarios based on real maps guarantee that in the 60%–70% of cases the proposed On-SiteDriverID successfully obtains the identity of the drivers.     

一个匿名的基于生物特征的多服务器的密钥认证协议方案的研究

随着通讯技术的快速发展,用户的口令与生物特征值的结合越来越普遍。最近,Chuang等提出了一个基于用户口令和生物特征值的匿名的多服务器的认证密钥协议方案。本文指出了Chuang等协议容易受到丢失智能卡攻击、伪装攻击、重放攻击和服务器伪装攻击,并且没有提供匿名性。因此针对上述协议的安全缺陷,本文提出了一个新的、有效的基于生物特征的多服务器的密钥认证协议。通过详细的安全和性能分析,证明出本文所提出的协议能够抵抗多种攻击,并且提供匿名性,与Chuang等协议相比,该新协议更加安全和实用。     

A user friendly authentication scheme with anonymity for wireless communications

Secure user authentication is an important issue for wireless environment such as GSM, CDPD, and 3G and 4G wireless systems. Especially, anonymity of the mobile users should be guaranteed to protect the privacy of the mobile users. This paper proposes a user friendly authentication scheme with anonymity for wireless communications that not only can overcome the weaknesses of the previous related schemes, but also can provide efficiency and security to suitable for battery-powered mobile devices in wireless communication systems.     

A remote user authentication scheme without using smart cards

User authentication is one of the fundamental procedures to ensure secure communications over an insecure public network channel. Especially, due to tamper-resistance and convenience in managing a password file, various user authentication schemes using smart cards have been proposed. A smart card however far from ubiquitous because of the high cost of a smart card and the infrastructure requirements. In this paper, we study secure user authentication using only a common storage device such as a universal serial bus (USB) memory, instead of using smart cards. We first show that the existing schemes using smart cards cannot be immediately converted into schemes using a common storage device. We then propose a practical and secure user authentication scheme, capable of supporting the use of the common storage device, which retains all the advantages of schemes using smart cards.     

Improvement of the secure dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme for multi-server environment

Recently, Liao and Wang proposed a secure dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme for multi-server environment, and claimed that their scheme was intended to provide mutual authentication, two-factor security, replay attack, server spoofing attack, insider and stolen verifier attack, forward secrecy and user anonymity. In this paper, we show that Liao and Wang's scheme is still vulnerable to insider's attack, masquerade attack, server spoofing attack, registration center spoofing attack and is not reparable. Furthermore, it fails to provide mutual authentication. To remedy these flaws, this paper proposes an efficient improvement over Liao–Wang's scheme with more security. The computation cost, security, and efficiency of the improved scheme are well suited to the practical applications environment.     

Cryptanalysis and security enhancement of a ‘more efficient & secure dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme’

Remote user authentication is a method, in which remote server verifies the legitimacy of a user over an insecure communication channel. Currently, smart card-based remote user authentication schemes have been widely adopted due to their low computational cost and convenient portability for the authentication purpose. Recently, Wang et al. proposed a dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. They claimed that their scheme preserves anonymity of user, has the features of strong password chosen by the server, and protected from several attacks. However, in this paper, we point out that Wang et al.’s scheme has practical pitfalls and is not feasible for real-life implementation. We identify that their scheme: does not provide anonymity of a user during authentication, user has no choice in choosing his password, vulnerable to insider attack, no provision for revocation of lost or stolen smart card, and does provide session key agreement. To remedy these security flaws, we propose an enhanced authentication scheme, which covers all the identified weaknesses of Wang et al.’s scheme and is more secure and efficient for practical application environment.     

A fuzzy-based interleaved multi-hop authentication scheme in wireless sensor networks

In sensor networks, a compromised node can either generate fabricated reports with false votes or inject false votes into real reports, which causes severe damage such as false alarms, energy drain and information loss. An interleaved hop-by-hop authentication (IHA) scheme addresses the former attack by detecting and filtering false reports in a deterministic and hop-by-hop fashion. Unfortunately, in IHA, all en-route nodes must join to verify reports while only a few are necessary to the authentication procedure. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy-based interleaved multi-hop authentication scheme based on IHA. In our scheme, the fuzzy logic system only selects some nodes for verification based on the network characteristics. Moreover, we apply a voting method and a hash-based key assignment mechanism to improve network security. Through performance evaluation, the proposed scheme is found to save up to 13% of the energy consumption and to provide more network protection compared to IHA.     

An efficient biometrics-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards

In this paper, we propose an efficient biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards, in which the computation cost is relatively low compared with other related schemes. The security of the proposed scheme is based on the one-way hash function, biometrics verification and smart card. Moreover, the proposed scheme enables the user to change their passwords freely and provides mutual authentication between the users and the remote server. In addition, many remote authentication schemes use timestamps to resist replay attacks. Therefore, synchronized clock is required between the user and the remote server. In our scheme, it does not require synchronized clocks between two entities because we use random numbers in place of timestamps.     

Password authentication schemes with smart cards

In this paper, two password authentication schemes with smart cards are proposed. In the schemes, users can change their passwords freely, and the remote system does not need the directory of passwords or verification tables to authenticate users. Once the secure network environment is set up, authentication can be handled solely by the two parties involved. For a network without synchronized clocks, the proposed nonce-based authentication scheme is able to prevent malicious reply attacks.     

An efficient mutual authentication and key agreement protocol preserving user anonymity in mobile networks

We address the problem of mutual authentication and key agreement with user anonymity for mobile networks. Recently, Lee et al. proposed such a scheme, which is claimed to be a slight modification of, but a security enhancement on Zhu et al.’s scheme based on the smart card. In this paper, however, we reveal that both schemes still suffer from certain weaknesses which have been previously overlooked, and thus are far from the desired security. We then propose a new protocol which is immune to various known types of attacks. Analysis shows that, while achieving identity anonymity, key agreement fairness, and user friendliness, our scheme is still cost-efficient for a general mobile node.     

增强的基于智能卡的远程用户认证协议

基于智能卡的远程用户认证协议比基于口令的安全协议能提供更好的安全性。2011年Chen等提出一种对Hsiang-Shih方案改进的基于智能卡的远程认证协议,并称解决了相关方案中存在的各种攻击问题。指出Chen等方案仍然存在着内部攻击、丢失智能卡攻击、重放攻击和身份冒充攻击,并针对基于口令和智能卡的远程认证协议类存在的离线口令猜测攻击提出一种基于智能卡和椭圆曲线离散对数问题的认证协议。该协议能抵抗提到的所有攻击,在登陆和认证阶段只需要一个点乘运算。     

A user friendly mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for wireless sensor networks using chaotic maps

Spread of wireless network technology has opened new doors to utilize sensor technology in various areas via Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Many authentication protocols for among the service seeker users, sensing component sensor nodes (SNs) and the service provider base-station or gateway node (GWN) are available to realize services from WSNs efficiently and without any fear of deceit. Recently, Li et al. and He et al. independently proposed mutual authentication and key agreement schemes for WSNs. We find that both the schemes achieve mutual authentication, establish session key and resist many known attacks but still have security weaknesses. We show the applicability of stolen verifier, user impersonation, password guessing and smart card loss attacks on Li et al.’s scheme. Although their scheme employs the feature of dynamic identity, an attacker can reveal and guess the identity of a registered user. We demonstrate the susceptibility of He et al.’s scheme to password guessing attack. In both the schemes, the security of the session key established between user and SNs is imperfect due to lack of forward secrecy and session-specific temporary information leakage attack. In addition both the schemes impose extra computational load on resource scanty sensor-nodes and are not user friendly due to absence of user anonymity and lack of password change facility. To handle these drawbacks, we design a mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for WSN using chaotic maps. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose an authentication scheme for WSN based on chaotic maps. We show the superiority of the proposed scheme over its predecessor schemes by means of detailed security analysis and comparative evaluation. We also formally analyze our scheme using BAN logic.     

Loss tolerant video streaming authentication in heterogeneous wireless networks

Multicast video streaming in heterogeneous networks undergoes to very different physical constraints, in fact, such networks are characterized by different QoS parameters, involving one or more transcoding process between the sender and the receivers. Video streaming authentication algorithms must be robust to transcoding processes and must guarantee the copyright of the video owner/producer. We propose a real-time video streaming authentication algorithm that can guarantee the copyright of the video owner and that we prove to be robust to packet loss and transcoding processes.     

基于智能卡的远程用户匿名身份认证和密钥协商方案

分析了Li-Niu等(LI X, NIU J W, KHAN M K, et al. An enhanced smart card based remote user password authentication scheme［J］. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 2013, 36(5):1365-1371.)基于智能卡的远程用户登录认证方案,指出了方案中存在的安全性问题,并提出了改进方案。新方案利用一种自认证的时间戳技术,与对称加密技术相结合,解决了多数智能卡方案中存在的时钟同步问题。与Li-Niu方案相比,新方案不仅可以提供用户的匿名登录,而且能够抵抗扮演攻击和内部攻击,适用于复杂的网络环境。     

On the anonymity of two-factor authentication schemes for wireless sensor networks: Attacks,principle and solutions

Anonymity is among the important properties of two-factor authentication schemes for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to preserve user privacy. Though impressive efforts have been devoted to designing schemes with user anonymity by only using lightweight symmetric-key primitives such as hash functions and block ciphers, to the best of our knowledge none has succeeded so far. In this work, we take an initial step to shed light on the rationale underlying this prominent issue. Firstly, we scrutinize two previously-thought sound schemes, namely Fan et al.’s scheme and Xue et al.’s scheme, and demonstrate the major challenges in designing a scheme with user anonymity.Secondly, using these two foremost schemes as case studies and on the basis of the work of Halevi–Krawczyk (1999) [44] and Impagliazzo–Rudich (1989) [43], we put forward a general principle: Public-key techniques are intrinsically indispensable to construct a two-factor authentication scheme that can support user anonymity. Furthermore, we discuss the practical solutions to realize user anonymity. Remarkably, our principle can be applied to two-factor schemes for universal environments besides WSNs, such as the Internet, global mobility networks and mobile clouds. We believe that our work contributes to a better understanding of the inherent complexity in achieving user privacy, and will establish a groundwork for developing more secure and efficient privacy-preserving two-factor authentication schemes.