A secure and efficient mutual authentication scheme for session initiation protocol

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the core signaling protocol for multimedia services is receiving much attention. Authentication is becoming increasingly crucial issue when a user asks to use SIP services. Many authentication schemes for the SIP have been proposed. Very recently, Zhang et al. has presented an authentication scheme for SIP and claimed their scheme could overcome various attacks while maintaining efficiency. In this research, we illustrate that their scheme is susceptible to the insider attack and does not provide proper mutual authentication. We then propose a modified secure mutual authentication scheme to conquer the security flaws in Zhang et al.’s scheme. Through the informal and formal security analyses, we demonstrate that our scheme is resilient possible known attacks including the attacks found in Zhang et al.’s scheme. In addition, the performance analysis shows that our scheme has better efficiency in comparison with other related ECC-based authentication schemes for SIP.     

Security analysis and enhancements of an improved authentication for session initiation protocol with provable security

Very recently, Tu et al. proposed an authentication scheme for session initiation protocol using smart card to overcome the security flaws of Zhang et al.’s protocol. They claimed that their protocol is secure against known security attacks. However, in this paper, we indicate that Tu et al.’s protocol is insecure against impersonation attack. We show that an adversary can easily masquerade as a legal server to fool users. As a remedy, we also improve Tu et al.’s protocol without imposing extra computation cost. To show the security of our protocol, we prove its security in the random oracle model.     

Cryptanalysis and improvement of a robust smart card secured authentication scheme on SIP using elliptic curve cryptography

The session initiation protocol (SIP) has been receiving a lot of attention to provide security in the Voice over IP (VoIP) in Internet and mobility management. Recently, Yeh et al. proposed a smart card-based authentication scheme for SIP using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). They claimed that their scheme is secure against known security attacks. However, in this paper, we indicate that Yeh et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to off-line password guessing attack, user impersonation attack and server impersonation attack, in the case that the smart card is stolen and the information stored in the smart card is disclosed. As a remedy, we also propose an improved smart card-based authentication scheme which not only conquers the security weaknesses of the related schemes but also provides a reduction in computational cost. The proposed scheme also provides the user anonymity and untraceability, and allows a user to change his/her password without informing the remote server. To show the security of our protocol, we prove its security the random oracle model.     

An efficient improvement remote user mutual authentication and session key agreement scheme for E-health care systems

The E-health care systems allow patients to gain the health monitoring facility and access medical services remotely. A secure mechanism for mutual authentication and session key agreement is the most important requirements for E-Health Care Systems. Recently, Amin et al.’s proposed a mutual authentication and session key agreement protocol and claimed that their scheme is secure against all possible attacks. In this paper, we show that not only their scheme is vulnerable to privileged-insider attack, replay attack, session key disclosure attack, but also does not provide patient untraceability and backward secrecy. In order to withstand the mentioned security weaknesses, we propose an efficient remote mutual authentication scheme for the systems which are using ECC and Fuzzy Extractor. The proposed scheme not only resists against different security attacks, but it also provides an efficient registration, login, mutual authentication, session key agreement, and password and biometric update phases. During the experimentation, it has been observed that the proposed scheme is secure against various known attacks. Beside, our scheme is robust against privileged-insider attack that it rarely checked in security analysis. The informal analysis will ensure that our scheme provides well security protection against the different security attacks. Furthermore, we analyzed the security of the scheme using AVISPA software and Random Oracle Model. The formal analysis results and performance evaluation vouch that our scheme is also secure and efficient in computation and communication cost.     

Enhanced Dynamic Authentication Scheme (EDAS)

With non-stop growth in network environments, communication security is necessary. A strong protocol guarantees that users and service providers are secure against many kinds of attacks, such as impersonation and replay attack. Sood et al. proposed an authentication scheme based on dynamic identity to prevent transactions from being intercepted by malicious users. Although they claimed that their scheme has advantages over previous schemes with the same approach, we prove that their scheme is vulnerable to impersonation attack and stolen verification attack, and can be affected by clock synchronization. Therefore we propose a novel authentication scheme to enhance security and overcome limitations existing in Sood’s scheme. Our security analysis shows that our proposed method can efficiently resist known types of attacks. Experimental results also show that the method can be implemented and processed in real-time thus applicable for not only regular computers but also mobile devices.     

Elliptic curve cryptography based mutual authentication scheme for session initiation protocol

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the most widely used signaling protocol for controlling communication on the internet, establishing, maintaining, and terminating the sessions. The services that are enabled by SIP are equally applicable in the world of multimedia communication. Recently, Tsai proposed an efficient nonce-based authentication scheme for SIP. In this paper, we do a cryptanalysis of Tsai’s scheme and show that Tsai’s scheme is vulnerable to the password guessing attack and stolen-verifier attack. Furthermore, Tsai’s scheme does not provide known-key secrecy and perfect forward secrecy. We also propose a novel and secure mutual authentication scheme based on elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem for SIP which is immune to the presented attacks.     

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.     

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。     

An anonymous two-factor authenticated key agreement scheme for session initiation protocol using elliptic curve cryptography

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol widely applied in the world of multimedia communication. Numerous SIP authenticated key agreement schemes have been proposed with the purpose of ensuring security communication. Farash recently put forward an enhancement employing smart cards counted on Zhang et al.’s scheme. In this study, we observe that the enhanced scheme presented by Farash has also some security pitfalls, such as disclosure of user identity, lack of a pre-authentication in the smart card and vulnerability to key-compromise masquerading attack which results in an off-line guessing attack. We then propose an anonymous modified scheme with elliptic curve cryptography to eliminate the security leakages of the scheme proposed by Farash. We demonstrate that our scheme is immune to different kinds of attacks including attacks involved in Farash’s scheme. We mention Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic for completeness of the proposed scheme. Also, we compare the performance of our scheme with its predecessor schemes and the comparative results shows that it perfectly satisfies the needs of SIP.     

Provably secure authenticated key agreement scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing services

With the rapid development of mobile cloud computing, the security becomes a crucial part of communication systems in a distributed mobile cloud computing environment. Recently, in 2015, Tsai and Lo proposed a privacy-aware authentication scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing services. In this paper, we first analyze the Tsai–Lo’s scheme and show that their scheme is vulnerable to server impersonation attack, and thus, their scheme fails to achieve the secure mutual authentication. In addition, we also show that Tsai–Lo’s scheme does not provide the session-key security (SK-security) and strong user credentials’ privacy when ephemeral secret is unexpectedly revealed to the adversary. In order to withstand these security pitfalls found in Tsai–Lo’s scheme, we propose a provably secure authentication scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing services. Through the rigorous security analysis, we show that our scheme achieves SK-security and strong credentials’ privacy and prevents all well-known attacks including the impersonation attack and ephemeral secrets leakage attack. 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. More security functionalities along with reduced computational costs for the mobile users make our scheme more appropriate for the practical applications as compared to Tsai–Lo’s scheme and other related schemes. Finally, to demonstrate the practicality of the scheme, we evaluate the proposed scheme using the broadly-accepted NS-2 network simulator.     

Efficient and secure two-factor dynamic ID-based password authentication scheme with provable security

Password-based remote user authentication schemes using smart cards are designed to ensure that only a user who possesses both the smart card and the corresponding password can gain access to the remote servers. Despite many research efforts, it remains a challenging task to design a secure password-based authentication scheme with user anonymity. The author uses Kumari et al.’s scheme as the case study. Their scheme uses non-public key primitives. The author first presents the cryptanalysis of Kumari et al.’s scheme in which he shows that their scheme is vulnerable to user impersonation attack, and does not provide forward secrecy and user anonymity. Using the case study, he has identified that public-key techniques are indispensable to construct a two-factor authentication scheme with security attributes, such as user anonymity, unlinkability and forward secrecy under the nontamper resistance assumption of the smart card. The author proposes a password-based authentication scheme using elliptic curve cryptography. Through the informal and formal security analysis, he shows that proposed scheme is secure against various known attacks, including the attacks found in Kumari’s scheme. Furthermore, he verifies the correctness of mutual authentication using the BAN logic.     

An efficient two-factor user authentication scheme with unlinkability for wireless sensor networks

User authentication with unlinkability is one of the corner stone services for many security and privacy services which are required to secure communications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Recently, Xue et al. proposed a temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs, and claimed that their scheme achieves identity and password protection, and the resiliency of stolen smart card attacks. However, we observe that Xue et al.’s scheme is subject to identity guessing attack, tracking attack, privileged insider attack and weak stolen smart card attack. In order to fix the drawbacks, we propose an enhanced authentication scheme with unlinkability. Additionally, the proposed scheme further cuts the computational cost. Therefore, the proposed scheme not only remedies its security flaws but also improves its performance. It is more suitable for practical applications of WSNs than Xue et al.’s scheme.     

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.     

Perfect forward secrecy in VoIP networks through design a lightweight and secure authenticated communication scheme

With the growth of the internet, development of IP based services has increased. Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is one of the services which works based on the internet and packet switching networks and uses this structure to transfer the multimedia data e.g. voices and images. Recently, Chaudhry et al., Zhang et al. and Nikooghadam et al. have presented three authentication and key agreement protocols, separately. However, in this paper, it is proved that the presented protocols by Chaudhry et al. and also Nikooghadam et al. do not provide the perfect forward secrecy, and the presented protocol by Zhang et al. not only is vulnerable to replay attack, and known session-specific temporary information attack, but also does not provide user anonymity, re-registration and revocation, and violation of fast error detection. Therefore, a secure and efficient two-factor authentication and key agreement protocol is presented. The security analysis proves that our proposed protocol is secure against various attacks. Furthermore, security of proposed scheme is formally analyzed using BAN logic and simulated by means of the AVISPA tool. The simulation results demonstrate security of presented protocol against active and passive attacks. The communication and computation cost of the proposed scheme is compared with previously proposed authentication schemes and results confirm superiority of the proposed scheme.

     

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.

     

Cryptanalysis and improvement of ‘a secure authentication scheme for telecare medical information system’ with nonce verification

In 2009, Xu et al. presented an improved smartcard based authentication scheme while using a security model previously applied by Bellare et al. to prove the security of their authentication methods. Later on, in 2012, Wu et al. pointed out number of authentication attacks in Xu et al. scheme. To address these issues, Wu et al. presented a Smartcard based Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) scheme for Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS) facility. In this study, we prove that authentication scheme of Wu et al. is still vulnerable to impersonation attack, offline password guessing attack, forgery attack and many other attacks. Moreover, number of performance and verification issues are also outlined in the authentication scheme of Wu et al. To overcome these issues, an improved and enhanced 3FA Smartphone based authentication method is proposed on a Cloud Computing environment. The proposed scheme is further corroborated using Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic (BAN logic) nonce verification. The detailed BAN logic verification and further security analysis shows that the proposed authentication protocol is highly reliable and secure in terms of message verifications, message freshness and trustworthiness of its origin. Moreover, the comparative security, performance and feature analysis shows that the proposed work yields an even more improved and enhanced authentication framework as compared to Wu et al. authentication scheme.     

Cryptanalysis of two three-party encrypted key exchange protocols

Due to the simplicity of maintaining human memorable passwords without any assistant storage device, password-based three-party encrypted key exchange (3PEKE) protocol has become one of the most promising research fields on user authentication and secure communication. In 2008, Chen et al. and Yoon and Yoo both pointed that Chang and Chang's password-based 3PEKE scheme cannot resist against undetectable on-line password guessing attacks, and then respectively proposed an improved protocol to eliminate the security vulnerability. However, based on the security analyses conducted by us, we find that both of their protocols are still vulnerable against undetectable on-line password guessing attacks. Accordingly, we develop a novel 3PEKE protocol to remedy these authentication flaws. Moreover, our proposed protocol can achieve better performance efficiency by requiring only four message transmission rounds. In conclusion, we can claim that our proposed 3PEKE protocol is more secure and efficient in comparison with the protocols proposed by Chen et al. and Yoon and Yoo.     

A secure and robust temporal credential-based three-factor user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks

User authentication is one of the most important security services required for the resource-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In user authentication, for critical applications of WSNs, a legitimate user is allowed to query and collect the real-time data at any time from a sensor node of the network as and when he/she demands for it. In order to get the real-time information from the nodes, the user needs to be first authenticated by the nodes as well as the gateway node (GWN) of WSN so that illegal access to nodes do not happen in the network. Recently, Jiang et al. proposed an efficient two-factor user authentication scheme with unlinkability property in WSNs Jiang (2014). In this paper, we analyze Jiang et al.’s scheme. Unfortunately, we point out that Jiang et al.’s scheme has still several drawbacks such as (1) it fails to protect privileged insider attack, (2) inefficient registration phase for the sensor nodes, (3) it fails to provide proper authentication in login and authentication phase, (4) it fails to update properly the new changed password of a user in the password update phase, (5) it lacks of supporting dynamic sensor node addition after initial deployment of nodes in the network, and (6) it lacks the formal security verification. In order to withstand these pitfalls found in Jiang et al.’s scheme, we aim to propose a three-factor user authentication scheme for WSNs. Our scheme preserves the original merits of Jiang et al.’s scheme. Our scheme is efficient as compared to Jiang et al.’s scheme and other schemes. Furthermore, our scheme provides better security features and higher security level than other schemes. In addition, we simulate our scheme for the formal security analysis using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool. The simulation results clearly demonstrate that our scheme is also secure.     

Cryptanalysis of Arshad et al.’s ECC-based mutual authentication scheme for session initiation protocol

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has been widely used in the current Internet protocols such as Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) and Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP). However, the original SIP authentication scheme was insecure and many researchers tried to propose schemes to overcome the flaws. In the year 2011, Arshad et al. proposed a SIP authentication protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), but their scheme suffered from off-line password guessing attack along with password change pitfalls. To conquer the mentioned weakness, we proposed an ECC-based authentication scheme for SIP. Our scheme only needs to compute four elliptic curve scale multiplications and two hash-to-point operations, and maintains high efficiency. The analysis of security of the ECC-based protocol shows that our scheme is suitable for the applications with higher security requirement.     

Cryptanalysis of a remote user authentication scheme for mobile client–server environment based on ECC

Understanding security failures of cryptographic protocols is the key to both patching existing protocols and designing future schemes. The design of secure remote user authentication schemes based on elliptic curve crypto-graphy (ECC) for mobile applications is still quite a challenging problem, though many schemes have been published lately. In this paper, we analyze an efficient ID-based scheme for mobile client–server environment without the MapToPoint function introduced by He et al. in 2012. This proposal attempts to overcome many of the well known security and efficiency shortcomings of previous schemes, and it also carries a claimed proof of security in the random oracle model. However, notwithstanding its formal security arguments, we show that He et al.’s protocol even cannot attain the basic goal of mutual authentication by demonstrating its vulnerabilities to reflection attack and parallel session attack. Besides these two security vulnerabilities, their scheme also suffers from some practical pitfalls such as user anonymity violation and clock synchronization problem. In addition, we carry out an investigation into their security proof and propose some changes to the scheme so that it can achieve at least its basic security goal, in the hope that similar mistakes are no longer made in the future.