An efficient remote user authentication and key agreement protocol for mobile client–server environment from pairings

With the continue evaluation of mobile devices in terms of the capabilities and services, security concerns increase dramatically. To provide secured communication in mobile client–server environment, many user authentication protocols from pairings have been proposed. In 2009, Goriparthi et al. proposed a new user authentication scheme for mobile client–server environment. In 2010, Wu et al. demonstrated that Goriparthi et al.’s protocol fails to provide mutual authentication and key agreement between the client and the server. To improve security, Wu et al. proposed an improved protocol and demonstrated that their protocol is provably secure in random oracle model. Based on Wu et al.’s work, Yoon et al. proposed another scheme to improve performance. However, their scheme just reduces one hash function operation at the both of client side and the server side. In this paper, we present a new user authentication and key agreement protocol using bilinear pairings for mobile client–server environment. Performance analysis shows that our protocol has better performance than Wu et al.’s protocol and Yoon et al.’s protocol. Then our protocol is more suited for mobile client–server environment. Security analysis is also given to demonstrate that our proposed protocol is provably secure against previous attacks.     

A secure and enhanced elliptic curve cryptography‐based dynamic authentication scheme using smart card

In remote system security, 2‐factor authentication is one of the security approaches and provides fundamental protection to the system. Recently, numerous 2‐factor authentication schemes are proposed. In 2014, Troung et al proposed an enhanced dynamic authentication scheme using smart card mainly to provide anonymity, secure mutual authentication, and session key security. By the analysis of Troung et al's scheme, we observed that Troung et al' s scheme does not provide user anonymity, perfect forward secrecy, server's secret key security and does not allow the user to choose his/her password. We also identified that Troung et al's scheme is vulnerable to replay attack. To fix these security weaknesses, a robust authentication scheme is proposed and analyzed using the formal verification tool for measuring the robustness. From the observation of computational efficiency of the proposed scheme, we conclude that the scheme is more secure and easy to implement practically.     

An Improved and Secure Two-factor Dynamic ID Based Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Multiserver Environment

The smart card based password authentication scheme is one of the most important and efficient security mechanism, which is used for providing security to authorized users over an insecure network. In this paper, we analyzed major security flaws of Jangirala et al.’s scheme and proved that it is vulnerable to forgery attack, replay attack, user impersonation attack. Also, Jangirala et al.’s scheme fail to achieve mutual authentication as it claimed. We proposed an improved two factor based dynamic ID based authenticated key agreement protocol for the multiserver environment. The proposed scheme has been simulated using widely accepted AVISPA tool. Furthermore, mutual authentication is proved through BAN logic. The rigorous security and performance analysis depicts that the proposed scheme provides users anonymity, mutual authentication, session key agreement and secure against various active attacks.     

An enhanced anonymous and unlinkable user authentication and key agreement protocol for TMIS by utilization of ECC

The telecare medicine information systems (TMISs) not only help patients to receive incessant health care services but also assist the medical staffs to access patients' electronic health records anytime and from anywhere via Internet. Since the online communications are exposed to numerous security threats, the mutual authentication and key agreement between patients and the medical servers are of prime significance. During the recent years, various user authentication schemes have been suggested for the TMISs. Nonetheless, most of them are susceptible to some known attacks or have high computational cost. Newly, an effective remote user authentication and session key agreement protocol has been introduced by Ravanbakhsh and Nazari for health care systems. Besides the nice contributions of their work, we found that it has two security weaknesses, namely, known session‐specific temporary information attack and lack of perfect forward secrecy. As a result, to overcome these deficiencies, this paper suggests a novel anonymous and unlinkable user authentication and key agreement scheme for TMISs using the elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC). We have evaluated the security of the proposed scheme by applying the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool with the intention of indicating that our scheme can satisfy the vital security features. In addition, we have compared the proposed protocol with related schemes to show that it has a proper level of performance. The obtained results demonstrate that the new scheme is more preferable considering both efficiency and security criteria.     

Secure user authentication scheme with novel server mutual verification for multiserver environments

The fast growth of mobile services and devices has made the conventional single‐server architecture ineffective from the point of its functional requirements. To extend the scalability and availability of mobile services to various applications, it is required to deploy multiserver architecture. In 2016, Moon et al insisted that Lu et al's scheme is weak to insiders and impersonation attack, then they proposed a biometric‐based scheme for authentication and key agreement of users in multiserver environments. Unfortunately, we analyze Moon et al's scheme and demonstrate that their scheme does not withstand various attacks from a malicious registered server. We propose a user authentication scheme with server mutual verification to overcome these security drawbacks. The proposed scheme withstands an attack from malicious insiders in multiserver environments. We use a threshold cryptography to strengthen the process of server authorization and to provide better security functionalities. We then prove the authentication and session key of the proposed scheme using Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham (BAN) logic and show that our proposed scheme is secure against various attacks.     

An efficient three factor–based authentication scheme in multiserver environment using ECC

Recently, Li et al have developed a smartcard‐based remote user authentication scheme in multiserver environment. They have claimed that their scheme is secured against some possible cryptographic attacks. However, we have analyzed that the scheme of Li et al cannot preserve all the proclaimed security goals, which are given as follows: (1) It is not withstanding password‐guessing, user impersonation, insider, and smartcard theft attacks, and (2) it fails to facilitate user anonymity property. To remedy these above‐mentioned security flaws, we have proposed an efficient three factor–based authentication scheme in a multiserver environment using elliptic curve cryptography. The Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic is used to confirm the security validation of our scheme, which ensures that it provides mutual‐authentication and session‐key agreement securely. Then, the random oracle model is also considered to analyze the proposed scheme, and it shows that the backbone parameters, ie, identity, password, biometrics, and the session key, are secure from an adversary. Further, the informal security analysis confirms that the suggested scheme can withstand against some possible mentioned attacks. Later, the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool is incorporated to ensure its security against passive and active attacks. Finally, the performance comparison of the scheme is furnished to confirm its enhanced security with other relevant schemes.     

A lightweight anonymous authentication scheme for consumer roaming in ubiquitous networks with provable security

Ubiquitous networks provide roaming service for mobile nodes enabling them to use the services extended by their home networks in a foreign network. A mutual authentication scheme between the roamed mobile node and the foreign network is needed to be performed through the home network. Various authentication schemes have been developed for such networks, but most of them failed to achieve security in parallel to computational efficiency. Recently, Shin et al. and Wen et al. separately proposed two efficient authentication schemes for roaming service in ubiquitous networks. Both argued their schemes to satisfy all the security requirements for such systems. However, in this paper, we show that Shin et al. 's scheme is susceptible to: (i) user traceability; (ii) user impersonation; (iii) service provider impersonation attacks; and (iv) session key disclosure. Furthermore, we show that Wen et al. 's scheme is also insecure against: (i) session key disclosure; and (ii) known session key attacks. To conquer the security problems, we propose an improved authentication scheme with anonymity for consumer roaming in ubiquitous networks. The proposed scheme not only improved the security but also retained a lower computational cost as compared with existing schemes. We prove the security of proposed scheme in random oracle model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Chaotic Map Based Mobile Dynamic ID Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme

When it comes to key agreement protocol, mutual authentication is regarded as a crucial security requirement. Yet, conventional authenticated key agreement using static ID cannot provide user anonymity if the communication content is compromised. A dynamic ID authentication scheme is a better alternative for maintaining user’s privacy. Based on the Chebyshev chaotic map, the author proposes a mobile dynamic ID authenticated key agreement scheme which allows mobile users to gain resources of remote servers. By optimizing the server computation, our scheme aims at increasing the concurrent process capacity of remote servers. We also demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure against existential active attacks and outperforms related works.     

Robust smart‐card‐based remote user password authentication scheme

Smart‐card‐based remote user password authentication schemes are commonly used for providing authorized users a secure method for remotely accessing resources over insecure networks. In 2009, Xu et al. proposed a smart‐card‐based password authentication scheme. They claimed their scheme can withstand attacks when the information stored on the smart card is disclosed. Recently, Sood et al. and Song discovered that the smart‐card‐based password authentication scheme of Xu et al. is vulnerable to impersonation and internal attacks. They then proposed their respective improved schemes. However, we found that there are still flaws in their schemes: the scheme of Sood et al. does not achieve mutual authentication and the secret key in the login phase of Song's scheme is permanent and thus vulnerable to stolen‐smart‐card and off‐line guessing attacks. In this paper, we will propose an improved and efficient smart‐card‐based password authentication and key agreement scheme. According to our analysis, the proposed scheme not only maintains the original secret requirement but also achieves mutual authentication and withstands the stolen‐smart‐card attack. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cryptanalysis and security enhancement of a robust two‐factor authentication and key agreement protocol

Two‐factor user authentication scheme allows a user to use a smart card and a password to achieve mutual authentication and establish a session key between a server and a user. In 2012, Chen et al. showed that the scheme of Sood et al. does not achieve mutual authentication and is vulnerable to off‐line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks. They also found that another scheme proposed by Song is vulnerable to similar off‐line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks. They further proposed an improved scheme. In this paper, we first show that the improved scheme of Chen et al. still suffers from off‐line password guessing and smart card stolen attacks, does not support perfect forward secrecy, and lacks the fairness of session key establishment. We then propose a new security‐enhanced scheme and show its security and authentication using the formal verification tool ProVerif, which is based on applied pi calculus. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Towards generalized ID‐based user authentication for mobile multi‐server environment

With the popularity of Internet and wireless networks, more and more network architectures are used in multi‐server environment, in which mobile users remotely access servers through open networks. In the past, many schemes have been proposed to solve the issue of user authentication for multi‐server environment and low‐power mobile devices. However, most of these schemes have suffered from many attacks because these schemes did not provide the formal security analysis. In this paper, we first give a security model for multi‐server environment. We then propose an ID‐based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme based on bilinear maps for mobile multi‐server environment. Our scheme can be used for both general users with a long validity period and anonymous users with a short validity period. Under the presented security model, we show that our scheme is secure against all known attacks. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme is well suitable for low‐power mobile devices. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Secure multi‐factor remote user authentication scheme for Internet of Things environments

Because of the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT), several services are being developed. These services can be accessed through smart gadgets by the user at any place, every time and anywhere. This makes security and privacy central to IoT environments. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, robust, and multi‐factor remote user authentication and key agreement scheme for IoT environments. Using this protocol, any authorized user can access and gather real‐time sensor data from the IoT nodes. Before gaining access to any IoT node, the user must first get authenticated by the gateway node as well as the IoT node. The proposed protocol is based on XOR and hash operations, and includes: (i) a 3‐factor authentication (ie, password, biometrics, and smart device); (ii) mutual authentication ; (iii) shared session key ; and (iv) key freshness . It satisfies desirable security attributes and maintains acceptable efficiency in terms of the computational overheads for resource constrained IoT environment. Further, the informal and formal security analysis using AVISPA proves security strength of the protocol and its robustness against all possible security threats. Simulation results also prove that the scheme is secure against attacks.     

A Strong Authentication Scheme with User Privacy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used for many real‐time applications. User authentication is an important security service for WSNs to ensure only legitimate users can access the sensor data within the network. In 2012, Yoo and others proposed a security‐performance‐balanced user authentication scheme for WSNs, which is an enhancement of existing schemes. In this paper, we show that Yoo and others' scheme has security flaws, and it is not efficient for real WSNs. In addition, this paper proposes a new strong authentication scheme with user privacy for WSNs. The proposed scheme not only achieves end‐party mutual authentication (that is, between the user and the sensor node) but also establishes a dynamic session key. The proposed scheme preserves the security features of Yoo and others' scheme and other existing schemes and provides more practical security services. Additionally, the efficiency of the proposed scheme is more appropriate for real‐world WSNs applications.     

An independent three‐factor mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with privacy preserving for multiserver environment and a survey

In the past decades, the demand for remote mutual authentication and key agreement (MAKA) scheme with privacy preserving grows rapidly with the rise of the right to privacy and the development of wireless networks and Internet of Things (IoT). Numerous remote MAKA schemes are proposed for various purposes, and they have different properties. In this paper, we survey 49 three‐factor–based remote MAKA schemes with privacy preserving from 2013 to 2019. None of them can simultaneously achieve security, suitability for multiserver environments, user anonymity, user untraceability, table free, public key management free, and independent authentication. Therefore, we propose an efficient three‐factor MAKA scheme, which achieves all the properties. We propose a security model of a three‐factor–based MAKA scheme with user anonymity for multiserver environments and formally prove that our scheme is secure under the elliptic curve computational Diffie‐Hellman problem assumption, decisional bilinear Diffie‐Hellman problem assumption, and hash function assumption. We compare the proposed scheme to relevant schemes to show our contribution and also show that our scheme is sufficiently efficient for low‐power portable mobile devices.     

An Improved User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme Providing User Anonymity

When accessing remote services over public networks, a user authentication mechanism is required because these activities are executed in an insecure communication environment. Recently, Wang et al. proposed an authentication and key agreement scheme preserving the privacy of secret keys and providing user anonymity. Later, Chang et al. indicated that their scheme suffers from two security flaws. First, it cannot resist DoS (denial-of-service) attack because the indicators for the next session are not consistent. Second, the user password may be modified by a malicious attacker because no authentication mechanism is applied before the user password is updated. To eliminate the security flaws and preserve the advantages of Wang et al.'s scheme, we propose an improvement in this paper.     

A privacy‐preserving biometrics based authenticated key agreement scheme using ECC

To ensure secure communication over the insecure public network, this work presents a privacy‐preserving biometrics‐based authenticated key agreement scheme using elliptic curve cryptography, making full use of the advantages that the biometrics can be used to uniquely identify a particular human, and the elliptic curve cryptography can provide the same level security with far less key size compared with other public key cryptography. The proposed scheme realizes the mutual authentication of participants, session key agreement, and various security properties and also can resist kinds of known attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme has perfect user experience in the aspect of changing password by not interacting with the server. In addition, the security features of our new designed scheme are formally proved under the widely used BPR adversary model. Therefore, from the viewpoint of the authors, the proposed scheme can be considered as the authenticated key agreement scheme for mobile users.     

An enhanced authentication with key agreement scheme for satellite communication systems

To ensure secure communication in satellite communication systems, recently, Zhang et al presented an authentication with key agreement scheme and claimed that their scheme satisfies various security requirements. However, this paper demonstrates that Zhang et al's scheme is insecure against the stolen‐verifier attack and the denial of service attack. Furthermore, to authenticate a user, Zhang et al's scheme requires large computational load to exhaustively retrieve the user's identity and password from the account database according to a temporary identity and then update the temporary identity in the database. To overcome the weaknesses existing in Zhang et al's scheme, we proposed an enhanced authentication with key agreement scheme for satellite communication systems. The analyses of our proposed scheme show that the proposed scheme possesses perfect security properties and eliminates the weaknesses of Zhang et al's scheme well. Therefore, from the authors' viewpoints, the proposed scheme is more suitable for the authentication scheme of mobile satellite communication systems.     

An enhanced two-factor user authentication in wireless sensor networks

Since wireless sensor networks (WSN) are often deployed in an unattended environment and sensor nodes are equipped with limited computing power modules, user authentication is a critical issue when a user wants to access data from sensor nodes. Recently, M.L. Das proposed a two-factor user authentication scheme in WSN and claimed that his scheme is secure against different kinds of attack. Later, Khan and Alghathbar (K-A) pointed out that Das’ scheme has some security pitfalls and showed several improvements to overcome these weaknesses. However, we demonstrate that in the K-A-scheme, there is no provision of non-repudiation, it is susceptible to the attack due to a lost smart card, and mutual authentication between the user and the GW-node does not attained. Moreover, the GW-node cannot prove that the first message comes from the user. To overcome these security weaknesses of the K-A-scheme, we propose security patches and prove our scheme.     

Privacy-preserving authenticated key agreement scheme based on biometrics for session initiation protocol

A secure key agreement scheme plays a major role in protecting communications between the users using voice over internet protocol over a public network like the internet. In this paper we present a strong security authenticated key agreement scheme for session initiation protocol (SIP) by using biometrics, passwords and smart cards. The proposed scheme realizes biometric data protection through key agreement process meanwhile achieving the verification of the biometric value on the SIP server side which is very important in designing a practical authenticated key agreement for SIP. The main merits of our proposed scheme are: (1) the SIP server does not need to maintain any password or verification table; (2) the scheme can provide user identity protection—the user’s real identity is protected by a secure symmetric encryption algorithm and the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, and it is transmitted in code; (3) the scheme can preserve the privacy of the user’s biometric data while the biometric matching algorithm is performed at the SIP server side, even if the server does not know the biometric data in the authentication process. Performance and security analysis shows that our proposed scheme increases efficiency significantly in comparison with other related schemes.     

Provable data possession scheme with authentication

To satisfy the requirements of identity authentication and data possession proven in the cloud application scenarios,a provable data possession scheme with authentication was proposed.Based on data tag signature and randomness reusing,the proposed scheme could accomplish several issues with three interactions,including the possession proof of cloud data,the mutual authentication between user and cloud computing server,the session key agreement and confirmation.Compared to the simple combination of authentication key agreement and provable data possession schemes,the proposed scheme has less computation and interactions,and better provable securities.In the random oracle model,the security proof of the proposed scheme is given under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption.