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.     

智能卡和口令结合的动态认证方案

远程认证协议能有效的保证远程用户和服务器在公共网络上的通信安全。提出一种匿名的安全身份认证方案,通过登录 的动态变化,提供用户登录的匿名性,通过用户和服务器相互验证建立共享的会话密钥,抵抗重放攻击和中间人攻击,实现用户安全和隐私,通过BAN逻辑分析证明改进方案的有效性,通过安全性证明和性能分析说明了新协议比同类型的方案具有更高的安全性、高效性。     

基于ECC的密钥协商及双向认证方案

针对当前移动通信系统中认证和密钥协商协议存在的安全缺陷,提出一种基于椭圆曲线密码体制的双向认证和密钥协商方案,用于移动网络中任意用户之间,或用户与网络之间进行双向认证和会话密钥的安全协商.该方案采用ECC技术,能够在更小的密钥量下提供更大的安全性,减少对带宽的需求,降低移动终端的计算负担和存储要求.     

Simple password-based three-party authenticated key exchange without server public keys

Password-based three-party authenticated key exchange protocols are extremely important to secure communications and are now extensively adopted in network communications. These protocols allow users to communicate securely over public networks simply by using easy-to-remember passwords. In considering authentication between a server and user, this study categorizes password-based three-party authenticated key exchange protocols into explicit server authentication and implicit server authentication. The former must achieve mutual authentication between a server and users while executing the protocol, while the latter only achieves authentication among users. This study presents two novel, simple and efficient three-party authenticated key exchange protocols. One protocol provides explicit server authentication, and the other provides implicit server authentication. The proposed protocols do not require server public keys. Additionally, both protocols have proven secure in the random oracle model. Compared with existing protocols, the proposed protocols are more efficient and provide greater security.     

具有强匿名性的网关口令认证密钥交换协议

网关口令认证密钥交换协议允许用户和网关在服务器的协助下建立起一个共享的会话密钥,其中用户和服务器之间的认证通过低熵的口令来完成.已有的网关口令认证密钥交换协议对用户的匿名性研究不足.该文基于Diffie-Hellman密钥交换提出了具有强匿名性的网关口令认证密钥交换协议,并且在随机预言模型下基于标准的DDH假设证明了协议的安全性.新协议可以抵抗不可检测在线字典攻击并且计算效率高,安全性和计算效率都优于已有的同类协议.     

Remote user authentication and key agreement for mobile client–server environments on elliptic curve cryptography

In recent years, with the rapid advance of wireless mobile networks, secure and efficient authentication mechanisms that can operate over insecure wireless channels have become increasingly essential. To improve the efficiency in the energy-limited mobile devices, many authentication schemes using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) have been presented. However, these schemes are still inefficient in terms of computation cost and communication overhead. Moreover, they suffer from various attacks, making them impractical due to their inherent design. To address their weaknesses, we propose a more efficient ID-based authentication scheme on ECC for mobile client–server environments with considering security requirements. The proposed scheme not only provides mutual authentication but also achieves session key agreement between the client and the server. Through a rigorous formal security proof under random oracle model, it has been indicated that the proposed protocol is secure against security threats. The informal security analysis shows that our scheme can resist well-known attacks and provides user anonymity. Performance analysis and comparison results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the related competitive works and is more suitable for practical application in mobile client–server environments.     

标准模型下隐私保护的多因素密钥交换协议

多因素认证密钥交换协议融合多种不同的认证因素来实现强安全的身份认证和访问控制,在具有高级别安全应用需求的移动泛在服务中具有巨大的应用潜力.现阶段多因素协议的研究成果还不丰富,并且已有协议都是在随机预言模型下可证明安全的.以两方口令认证密钥交换协议、鲁棒的模糊提取器以及签名方案为基本组件提出了一个标准模型下可证明安全的多因素协议.本文的协议中服务器不知道用户的生物模板,因此实现了对生物信息的隐私保护.与已有的随机预言模型下的多因素协议相比,本文的协议在满足更高安全性的同时具有更高的计算效率和通信效率,因此更满足高级别安全的移动泛在服务的应用需求.     

A lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol preserving user anonymity

Nowadays with widespread employment of the Internet, servers provide various services for legal users. The vital issue in client/server connections is authentication protocols that make the communication channel safe and secure against famous attacks. Recently, Kumari et al. and Chaudhry et al. proposed two authentication and key agreement protocols and illustrated that their proposed protocols are secure against various security attacks. However, in this paper we demonstrate that both protocols are vulnerable to off-line password guessing attacks. Moreover, we show that Kumari et al.’s protocol does not provide the property of user anonymity. In order to overcome these weaknesses, we propose a lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol. The correctness of the proposed protocol is proved using BAN logic. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol resists various security attacks and provides user anonymity. Furthermore, performance analysis confirms that the computation cost of the proposed protocol is acceptable.

     

An authenticated group key transfer protocol using elliptic curve cryptography

Several groupware applications like e-conferences, pay-per view, online games, etc. require a common session key to establish a secure communication among the group participants. For secure communication, such applications often need an efficient group key establishment protocol to construct a common session key for group communications. Conventional group key transfer protocols depends on mutually trusted key generation center (KGC) to generate and distribute the group key to each participant in each session. However, those approaches require extra communication overheads in the server setup. This paper presents an efficient and secure group key transfer protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The proposed protocol demonstrates a novel group key transfer protocol, in which one of the group member plays the role of KGC (the protocol without an online KGC, which is based on elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) and Shamir’s secret sharing scheme. The confidentiality of the proposed protocol is ensured by Shamir’s secret sharing, i.e., information theoretically secure and provides authentication using ECDLP. Furthermore, the proposed protocol resists against potential attacks (insider and outsider) and also significantly reduces the overheads of the system. The security analysis section of the present work also justifies the security attributes of the proposed protocol under various security assumptions.     

A strong user authentication scheme with smart cards for wireless communications

Seamless roaming over wireless network is highly desirable to mobile users, and security such as authentication of mobile users is challenging. Recently, due to tamper-resistance and convenience in managing a password file, some smart card based secure authentication schemes have been proposed. This paper shows some security weaknesses in those schemes. As the main contribution of this paper, a secure and light-weight authentication scheme with user anonymity is presented. It is simple to implement for mobile user since it only performs a symmetric encryption/decryption operation. Having this feature, it is more suitable for the low-power and resource-limited mobile devices. In addition, it requires four message exchanges between mobile user, foreign agent and home agent. Thus, this protocol enjoys both computation and communication efficiency as compared to the well-known authentication schemes. As a special case, we consider the authentication protocol when a user is located in his/her home network. Also, the session key will be used only once between the mobile user and the visited network. Besides, security analysis demonstrates that our scheme enjoys important security attributes such as preventing the various kinds of attacks, single registration, user anonymity, no password/verifier table, and high efficiency in password authentication, etc. Moreover, one of the new features in our proposal is: it is secure in the case that the information stored in the smart card is disclosed but the user password of the smart card owner is unknown to the attacker. To the best of our knowledge, until now no user authentication scheme for wireless communications has been proposed to prevent from smart card breach. Finally, performance analysis shows that compared with known smart card based authentication protocols, our proposed scheme is more simple, secure and efficient.     

A secure and efficient ECC-based user anonymity-preserving session initiation authentication protocol using smart card

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling communications protocol, which has been chosen for controlling multimedia communication in 3G mobile networks. The proposed authentication in SIP is HTTP digest based authentication. Recently, Tu et al. presented an improvement of Zhang et al.’s smart card-based authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP. Their scheme efficiently resists password guessing attack. However, in this paper, we analyze the security of Tu et al.’s scheme and demonstrate their scheme is still vulnerable to user’s impersonation attack, server spoofing attack and man-in-the middle attack. We aim to propose an efficient improvement on Tu et al.’s scheme to overcome the weaknesses of their scheme, while 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 Tu et al.’s scheme. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security analysis using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks including the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Additionally, the proposed scheme is comparable in terms of the communication and computational overheads with Tu et al.’s scheme and other related existing schemes.     

An efficient user authentication and key exchange protocol for mobile client–server environment

Considering the low-power computing capability of mobile devices, the security scheme design is a nontrivial challenge. The identity (ID)-based public-key system with bilinear pairings defined on elliptic curves offers a flexible approach to achieve simplifying the certificate management. In the past, many user authentication schemes with bilinear pairings have been proposed. In 2009, Goriparthi et al. also proposed a new user authentication scheme for mobile client–server environment. However, these schemes do not provide mutual authentication and key exchange between the client and the server that are necessary for mobile wireless networks. In this paper, we present a new user authentication and key exchange protocol using bilinear pairings for mobile client–server environment. As compared with the recently proposed pairing-based user authentication schemes, our protocol provides both mutual authentication and key exchange. Performance analysis is made to show that our presented protocol is well suited for mobile client–server environment. Security analysis is given to demonstrate that our proposed protocol is provably secure against previous attacks.     

An enhanced smart card based remote user password authentication scheme

Smart card based password authentication is one of the simplest and efficient authentication mechanisms to ensure secure communication in insecure network environments. Recently, Chen et al. have pointed out the weaknesses of some password authentication schemes and proposed a robust smart card based remote user password authentication scheme to improve the security. As per their claims, their scheme is efficient and can ensure forward secrecy of the session key. However, we find that Chen et al.'s scheme cannot really ensure forward secrecy, and it cannot detect the wrong password in login phase. Besides, the password change phase of Chen et al.'s scheme is unfriendly and inefficient since the user has to communicate with the server to update his/her password. In this paper, we propose a modified smart card based remote user password authentication scheme to overcome the aforementioned weaknesses. The analysis shows that our proposed scheme is user friendly and more secure than other related schemes.     

An anonymous mobile user authentication protocol using self-certified public keys based on multi-server architectures

As a smart phone becomes a daily necessity, mobile services are springing up. A mobile user should be authenticated and authorized before accessing these mobile services. Generally, mobile user authentication is a method which is used to validate the legitimacy of a mobile login user. As the rapid booming of computer networks, multi-server architecture has been pervasive in many network environments. Much recent research has been focused on proposing password-based remote user authentication protocols using smart cards for multi-server environments. To protect the privacy of users, many dynamic identity based remote user authentication protocols were proposed. In 2009, Hsiang and Shih claimed their protocol is efficient, secure, and suitable for the practical application environment. However, Sood et al. pointed out Hsiang et al.’s protocol is susceptible to replay attack, impersonation attack and stolen smart card attack. Moreover, the password change phase of Hsiang et al.’s protocol is incorrect. Thus, Sood et al. proposed an improved protocol claimed to be practical and computationally efficient. Nevertheless, Li et al. found that Sood et al.’s protocol is still vulnerable to leak-of-verifier attack, stolen smart card attack and impersonation attack and consequently proposed an improvement to remove the aforementioned weaknesses. In 2012, Liao et al. proposed a novel pairing-based remote user authentication protocol for multi-server environment, the scheme based on elliptic curve cryptosystem is more secure and efficient. However, through careful analyses, we find that Liao et al.’s protocol is still susceptible to the trace attack. Besides, Liao et al.’s protocol is inefficient since each service server has to update its ID table periodically. In this paper, we propose an improved protocol to solve these weaknesses. By enhancing the security, the improved protocol is well suited for the practical 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.     

基于双线性映射的三因子远程身份认证协议研究

为了提高多服务器环境身份认证的安全性,降低计算复杂度,提出一种基于双线性映射的三因子认证协议,这些因子包括生物信息、智能卡和双线性映射密码。该协议包括系统设置、服务器注册、用户注册、登录、认证和密钥协商,以及密码更新六个阶段,其中,生物因子和智能卡作为核心因子涉及注册、登录、认证和更改阶段。Oracle形式化证明验证了该协议的安全性,攻击者无法得到标志、密码、生物特征信息等,可以实现密钥协商和双向身份认证。与其他相关协议相比,该协议在安全特征、智能卡存储成本、通信成本等方面具有一定优势。     

基于扩展混沌映射的远程医疗信息系统认证方案

针对远程医疗信息系统（TMIS）的实时应用场景,提出了一种安全高效的基于扩展混沌映射的切比雪夫多服务器认证协议。该方案使用随机数和注册中心的私钥为用户/应用服务器的身份加密,有效地支持用户和应用服务器的撤销和重新注册。同时,还利用“模糊验证因子”技术避免离线密码猜测攻击,利用“honeywords”技术有效避免在线密码猜测攻击。该方案在公共信道上传输的与用户身份相关的信息均使用随机数或随机数的计算结果进行加密,因此可以为用户提供强匿名性。通过BAN逻辑证明该协议可以实现用户和服务器的安全相互认证;同时,使用非正式安全证明该协议可以抵抗多种已知攻击。     

一种基于ECC口令认证的RFID认证协议

为了确保RFID系统中用户安全风险、隐私及数据安全,分析了相关RFID协议的安全性问题,利用椭圆曲线离散对数问题的难解性,结合一次性口令OTP,提出了一种基于ECC口令认证的RFID双向认证协议。该协议实现了密钥同步更新,读写器与标签、标签与服务器之间的双向认证,有效地抵抗了重放、伪装、流量分析及跟踪等攻击。协议能很好地保护用户的隐私和数据的安全,具有密钥长度短、计算量小及安全性高等特点。     

可证明安全的后量子两方口令认证密钥协商协议

口令认证密钥协商可以在客户机和服务器之间建立安全的远程通信,且可以将一个低熵口令放大为一个高熵的会话密钥。然而,随着量子计算技术的快速发展,基于大数分解和离散对数等经典数学难题的PAKA协议面临着严峻的安全挑战。因此,为了构建一个高效安全的后量子PAKA协议,依据改进的Bellare-Pointcheval-Rogaway(BPR)模型,提出了一个基于格的匿名两方PAKA协议,并且使用给出严格的形式化安全证明。性能分析结果表明,该方案与相关的PAKA协议相比,在安全性和执行效率等方面有一定优势,更适用于资源受限的物联网(Internet of Things, IoT)智能移动设备。