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.     

A secure biometric based multi-server authentication scheme for social multimedia networks

Social networking is one of the major source of massive data. Such data is not only difficult to store, manipulate and maintain but it’s open access makes it security prone. Therefore, robust and efficient authentication should be devised to make it invincible against the known security attacks. Moreover, social networking services are intrinsically multi-server environments, therefore compatible and suitable authentication should be designed accordingly. Sundry authentication protocols are being utilized at the moment and many of them are designed for single server architecture. This type of remote architecture resists each user to get itself register with each server if multiple servers are employed to offer online social services. Recently multi-server architecture for authentication has replaced the single server architecture, and it enable users to register once and procure services from multiple servers. A short time ago, Lu et al. presented two authentication schemes based on three factors. Furthermore, both Lu et al.’s schemes are designed for multi-server architecture. Lu et al. claimed the schemes to be invincible against the known attacks. However, this paper shows that one of the Lu et al.’s scheme is susceptible to user anonymity violation and impersonation attacks, whereas Lu et al.’s second scheme is susceptible to user impersonation attack. Therefore an enhanced scheme is introduced in this paper. The proposed scheme is more robust than subsisting schemes. The proposed scheme is thoroughly verified and validated with formal and informal security discussion, and through the popular automated tool ProVerif. The in-depth analysis affirms that proposed scheme is lightweight in terms of computations while attaining mutual authentication and is invincible against the known attacks, hence is more suitable for automated big data analysis for social multimedia networking environments.     

对三个多服务器环境下匿名认证协议的分析

设计安全高效的多服务器环境下匿名身份认证协议是当前安全协议领域的研究热点。基于广泛接受的攻击者模型,对多服务器环境下的三个代表性匿名认证协议进行了安全性分析.指出Wan等协议无法实现所声称的离线口令猜测攻击,且未实现用户匿名性和前向安全性;指出Amin等协议同样不能抵抗离线口令猜测攻击,且不能提供匿名性,对两种破坏前向安全性的攻击是脆弱的;指出Reedy等协议不能抵抗所声称的用户仿冒攻击和离线口令猜测攻击,且无法实现用户不可追踪性.突出强调这些协议失败的根本原因在于,违反协议设计的三个基本原则：公钥原则、用户匿名性原则和前向安全性原则.明确协议的具体失误之处,并提出相应修正方法.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

基于D-H密钥交换协议的用户认证方案

分析指出Liaw等人的远程用户认证方案(Mathematical and Computer Modelling,2006,No.1/2)容易受到重放攻击和中间人攻击,并且密码修改阶段和注册阶段存在安全漏洞,在此基础上提出一个基于D-H密钥交换协议的远程用户认证方案.理论分析结果表明,该方案可以抵抗假冒攻击、重放攻击、中间人攻击,安全地实现相互认证及会话密钥生成.     

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.     

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.     

更安全的匿名三因子多服务器身份认证协议研究

多服务器架构下的身份认证协议是远程认证的关键,但许多现有方案都存在潜在的攻击,未实现三因子安全性,忽略了匿名性。因此,需要指出其中的错误,并提出一个匿名的三因子方案。通过攻击者模型,攻击了温翔等人的方案,检验了新方案;使用椭圆曲线密码,保障认证阶段的核心安全性;使用模糊提取器与验证器,保护生物特征与口令;经与同类协议比较,分析了新协议的优势。分析表明,温翔等人的方案不能抵抗服务器仿冒用户,不具匿名性等。而新协议能有效防范智能卡丢失攻击、仿冒攻击等更多样的攻击,实现了匿名性、前向安全性等更全面的功能,计算效率也比前人提高了约14.8%。因此,可以应用于对安全性、可靠性要求较高的多服务器认证网络。     

Weaknesses and improvement of Wang et al.'s remote user password authentication scheme for resource-limited environments

Recently, Wang et al. showed that two new verifier-free remote user password authentication schemes, Ku-Chen's scheme and Yoon et al.'s scheme, are vulnerable to an off-line password guessing attack, a forgery attack, and a denial-of-service attack, and then proposed an improved scheme for the real application in resource-limited environments. Unfortunately, we find that Wang et al.'s scheme is still vulnerable to an impersonation attack and an off-line password guessing attack. In addition, Wang et al.'s scheme is not easily reparable and is unable to provide perfect forward secrecy. Finally, we propose an improved scheme with better security strength.     

Improvements of authenticated encryption schemes with message linkages for message flows

Recently, Tseng et al. proposed two authenticated encryption schemes (basic scheme and generalized scheme) with message linkages, which are efficient in terms of the communication and computation costs in comparison with all the previously proposed schemes. The basic authenticated encryption scheme suited for only after receiving the entire signature blocks, the recipient can then recover the message blocks. In order to allow the receiver to perform the receiving and the recovering processes simultaneously according to application requirements and the transmission efficiency of the network, the generalized authenticated encryption scheme was then proposed. In this paper, we show that both Tseng et al.’s authenticated encryption schemes do not achieve integrity and authentication. Improvements are then proposed to repair the weaknesses.     

Secure Dynamic Identity-Based Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

ABSTRACT

In 2004, Das et al. proposed a dynamic identity-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. This scheme allows users to choose and change their passwords freely, and the server does not maintain any verification table. Das et al. claimed that their scheme is secure against stolen verifier attack, replay attack, forgery attack, dictionary attack, insider attack and identity theft. However, many researchers have demonstrated that Das et al.'s scheme is susceptible to various attacks. Furthermore, this scheme does not achieve mutual authentication and thus cannot resist malicious server attack. In 2009, Wang et al. argued that Das et al.'s scheme is susceptible to stolen smart card attack. If an attacker obtains the smart card of the user and chooses any random password, the attacker gets through the authentication process to get access of the remote server. Therefore, Wang et al. suggested an improved scheme to preclude the weaknesses of Das et al.'s scheme. However, we found that Wang et al.'s scheme is susceptible to impersonation attack, stolen smart card attack, offline password guessing attack, denial of service attack and fails to preserve the user anonymity. This paper improves Wang et al.'s scheme to resolve the aforementioned problems, while keeping the merits of different dynamic identity based smart card authentication schemes.     

对两个基于智能卡的多服务器身份认证方案的密码学分析与改进

身份认证是用户访问网络资源时的一个重要安全问题。近来,Xu等(XU C, JIA Z, WEN F, et al. Cryptanalysis and improvement of a dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards [J]. Journal of Computational Information Systems, 2013, 9(14): 5513-5520)提出了一个基于智能卡的动态身份用户认证方案。分析指出其方案不能抵抗中间人攻击和会话密钥泄露攻击,且无法实现会话密钥前向安全性。此外,指出Choi等(CHOI Y, NAM J, LEE D, et al. Security enhanced anonymous multiserver authenticated key agreement scheme using smart cards and biometrics [J]. The Scientific World Journal, 2014, 2014: 281305)提出的基于智能卡和生物特征的匿名多服务器身份认证方案(简称CNL方案)易遭受智能卡丢失攻击、服务器模仿攻击,且不能提保护用户的匿名性。最后,基于生物特征和扩展混沌映射,提出了一个安全的多服务器认证方案,安全分析结果表明,新方案消除了Xu方案和CNL方案的安全漏洞。     

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.     

无线传感器网络中具有匿名性的用户认证协议

对He等人提出的无线传感器网络用户认证协议(Ad-Hoc Sensor Wireless Networks, 2010, No.4)进行研究,指出该协议无法实现用户匿名性,不能抵抗用户仿冒攻击和网关节点旁路攻击,并利用高效的对称密码算法和单向hash函数对其进行改进。理论分析结果证明,改进协议可以实现用户匿名性、不可追踪性及实体认证,抵抗离线字典攻击、用户仿冒攻击和网关节点旁路攻击,与同类协议相比,计算效率更高。     

A privacy preserving three-factor authentication protocol for e-Health clouds

E-Health clouds are gaining increasing popularity by facilitating the storage and sharing of big data in healthcare. However, such an adoption also brings about a series of challenges, especially, how to ensure the security and privacy of highly sensitive health data. Among them, one of the major issues is authentication, which ensures that sensitive medical data in the cloud are not available to illegal users. Three-factor authentication combining password, smart card and biometrics perfectly matches this requirement by providing high security strength. Recently, Wu et al. proposed a three-factor authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptosystem which attempts to fulfill three-factor security and resist various existing attacks, providing many advantages over existing schemes. However, we first show that their scheme is susceptible to user impersonation attack in the registration phase. In addition, their scheme is also vulnerable to offline password guessing attack in the login and password change phase, under the condition that the mobile device is lost or stolen. Furthermore, it fails to provide user revocation when the mobile device is lost or stolen. To remedy these flaws, we put forward a robust three-factor authentication protocol, which not only guards various known attacks, but also provides more desired security properties. We demonstrate that our scheme provides mutual authentication using the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic.     

一个改进的基于混沌映射的移动端认证协议

摘要：人们使用移动设备进行电子转账,网上购物等经济活动需要认证协议来保证安全。最近,Zhu提出了一个基于混沌映射的认证协议方案。针对此方案,分析了其存在的缺陷,包括易遭受用户模仿攻击,离线字典攻击,无法提供用户匿名性,以及注册阶段及口令修改阶段存在设计缺陷,提出了一个改进的基于混沌映射（切比雪夫多项式）的移动端认证协议来克服这些缺陷。之后用BAN逻辑证明了安全性,又同其他相关方案进行了性能比较,结果显示提出的协议更加安全实用。     

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.