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.     

Scalable,password-based and threshold authentication for smart homes

Smart homes are a special use-case of the IoT paradigm, which is becoming more and more important in our lives. Although sensors, devices and applications make our daily lives easier, they often collect our sensitive data, which may lead to security problems (e.g., hacked devices, botnets, etc.). In several cases, the appropriate security mechanisms are missing within the devices. Therefore, security measures have become a central topic in the field of IoT. The most essential requirements are secure user–device authentication and confidentiality of transferred sensitive data. Passwords are the most widely used factors in various areas, such as user authentication, key establishment, and also secret sharing. Password-based protocols that are resistant to typical threats, such as offline dictionary, man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks, generate new session keys. The major aim of these solutions is to guarantee high-level security, even if a user applies a single low-entropy human memorable password for all their accounts. We introduce a threshold and password-based, distributed, mutual authenticated key agreement with key confirmation protocol for a smart home environment. The proposed protocol is a scalable and robust scheme, which forces the adversary to corrupt \(l-1\) smart home devices, where l is the threshold, in order to perform an offline dictionary attack. The protocol is designed to achieve password-only setting, and end-to-end security if the chosen IoT devices are also authenticated besides the user. We also provide a security analysis of the protocol in AVISPA. We apply the on-the-fly model checker and the constraint-logic-based attack searcher to perform protocol verification for bounded numbers of sessions. We show that the proposed protocol provides session key secrecy and mutual authentication of the user and the device manager. Since efficiency is a crucial aspect, we implemented our protocol to measure the computation and communication costs and demonstrate that our solution is appropriate and eligible for smart homes.

     

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 EARLY SUCCESS STORY

Abstract

In 2006, Shieh et al. proposed an efficient remote mutual authentication and key agreement scheme which uses smart cards and requires only hash function operations. In this paper, we show that Shieh et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to guessing attacks, forgery attacks and key compromise attacks. To eliminate these weaknesses, an improvement of Shieh et al.'s scheme with increased security is proposed. The security and efficiency of the improved scheme raises the attractiveness for implementation.     

Robust biometrics-based multi-server authentication with key agreement scheme for smart cards on elliptic curve cryptosystem

Conventional single-server authentication schemes suffer a significant shortcoming. If a remote user wishes to use numerous network services, he/she must register his/her identity and password at these servers. It is extremely tedious for users to register numerous servers. In order to resolve this problem, various multi-server authentication schemes recently have been proposed. However, these schemes are insecure against some cryptographic attacks or inefficiently designed because of high computation costs. Moreover, these schemes do not provide strong key agreement function which can provide perfect forward secrecy. Based on these motivations, this paper proposes a new efficient and secure biometrics-based multi-server authentication with key agreement scheme for smart cards on elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) without verification table to minimize the complexity of hash operation among all users and fit multi-server communication environments. By adopting the biometrics technique, the proposed scheme can provide more strong user authentication function. By adopting the ECC technique, the proposed scheme can provide strong key agreement function with the property of perfect forward secrecy to reduce the computation loads for smart cards. As a result, compared with related multi-serve authentication schemes, the proposed scheme has strong security and enhanced computational efficiency. Thus, the proposed scheme is extremely suitable for use in distributed multi-server network environments such as the Internet and in limited computations and communication resource environments to access remote information systems since it provides security, reliability, and efficiency.     

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.     

基于口令的远程身份认证及密钥协商协议

基于口令的身份认证协议是研究的热点。分析了一个低开销的基于随机数的远程身份认证协议的安全性,指出了该协议的安全缺陷。构造了一个基于随机数和Hash函数、使用智能卡的远程身份认证和密钥协商协议：PUAKP协议。该协议使用随机数,避免了使用时戳带来的重放攻击的潜在风险。该协议允许用户自主选择和更改口令,实现了双向认证,有较小的计算开销;能够抵御中间人攻击;具有口令错误敏感性、口令的主机非透明性和强安全修复性;生成的会话密钥具有新鲜性、机密性、已知密钥安全性和前向安全性。     

下一代高速铁路异构网络切换安全认证

近年来,随着高速铁路无线通信技术的快速发展,GSM-R无线通信系统将逐步向LTE-R系统演进。在此演进过程中存在GSM-R和LTE-R长期共存的局面,如何实现高速铁路无线通信异构网络之间的快速切换和安全认证成为铁路无线通信研究的热点问题。针对高速铁路无线通信异构网络切换认证过程中,存在安全性低和认证开销高等问题,提出了一种适用于下一代高速铁路异构网络的轻量级切换安全认证方案。首先,采用哈希函数等操作生成切换请求Token和异构网络切换认证码PASS,实现了用户身份匿名性和可追溯性等安全要求,并且高速列车无需多次注册就可实现异构网络间的无缝切换。其次,设计了基于椭圆曲线密钥交换的轻量级切换算法,完成了高速列车与目标基站的相互认证和密钥协商,降低了计算开销和通信开销,实现了会话协商密钥的前后向安全性。最后,采用形式化方式BAN逻辑进行了安全性验证,并使用朔黄铁路LTE-R线路实测数据进一步对本文所提方案的有效性进行了验证,分析得出所提方案能够满足可追溯性、匿名性、抗伪装用户攻击、抗中间人攻击和抗重放攻击等安全特性。性能分析表明,本文方案在通信开销和计算开销方面较比较方法性能更优,能够满足下一代高速铁路异构通信网络的高效、安全无缝切换的需求。     

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.     

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

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

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.     

A temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) can be deployed in any unattended environment. With the new developed IoT (Internet of Things) technology, remote authorized users are allowed to access reliable sensor nodes to obtain data and even are allowed to send commands to the nodes in the WSN. Because of the resource constrained nature of sensor nodes, it is important to design a secure, effective and lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme. The gateway node (GWN) plays a crucial role in the WSN as all data transmitted to the outside network must pass through it. We propose a temporal-credential-based mutual authentication scheme among the user, GWN and the sensor node. With the help of the password-based authentication, GWN can issue a temporal credential to each user and sensor node. For a user, his/her temporal credential can be securely protected and stored openly in a smart card. For a sensor node, its temporal credential is related to its identity and must privately stored in its storage medium. Furthermore, with the help of GWN, a lightweight key agreement scheme is proposed to embed into our protocol. The protocol only needs hash and XOR computations. The results of security and performance analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides relatively more security features and high security level without increasing too much overhead of communication, computation and storage. It is realistic and well adapted for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks.     

格上基于智能卡的安全口令认证方案

基于智能卡的认证方案是一种高效且常用的认证机制,但安全性基于数论难题构建的相关认证方案存在不能抵抗量子攻击、恶意读卡器攻击等问题.提出一种新的格上基于智能卡的口令认证方案,该方案利用格密码中近似平滑投射哈希函数和可拆分公钥密码体制,通过用户口令和智能卡完成与服务器的身份认证和会话密钥协商.该方案在随机预言模型下满足理论可证明安全,在抵抗量子攻击、恶意读卡器攻击和其他类型攻击方面有较高的可靠度.仿真实验表明,所提方案执行效率高,满足实际应用需求.     

基于相互认证和3DES加密的智能卡远程支付系统认证方案

针对现有基于智能卡支付系统的安全方案存在密码暴露、信息泄露和身份认证等问题,提出一种新的基于相互认证和3DES加密的智能卡远程支付系统认证方案。分析基于二次剩余的支付认证方案的不足,在注册、登录、身份认证和密码更改阶段对其进行改进,避免密码暴露攻击,提高密码更改阶段的安全性,同时结合3DES加密算法对支付信息进行加密处理。性能分析表明,该方案能有效抵御多种攻击,且用户能够自由地修改密码,同时可对用户信息进行匿名保护。与现有智能卡支付认证方案相比,该方案提高了支付系统的安全性能且具有较小的计算复杂度。     

基于双线性对的智能卡口令认证改进方案

通过对一种使用双线性对构造的智能卡口令认证方案的分析,发现该方案不能抵抗冒充攻击和服务器伪装攻击。针对该问题,提出一种改进的基于双线性对的智能卡口令认证方案,即利用服务器公钥进行加解密操作,通过引入序列号使用户与系统间进行了双向认证,不仅保持了原有方案的安全性,而且能有效地抵御冒充攻击和服务器伪装攻击,安全性更高。     

Secured Cloud Communication Using Lightweight Hash Authentication with PUF

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an awaited technology in real-world applications to process daily tasks using intelligent techniques. The main process of data in IoT involves communication, integration, and coordination with other real-world applications. The security of transferred, stored, and processed data in IoT is not ensured in many constraints. Internet-enabled smart devices are widely used among populations for all types of applications, thus increasing the popularity of IoT among widely used server technologies. Smart grid is used in this article with IoT to manage large data. A smart grid is a collection of numerous users in the network with the fastest response time. This article aims to provide high authentication to the smart grid, which constitutes secure communication in cloud-based IoT. Many IoT devices are deployed openly in all places. This open-access is vulnerable toward cloning attacks. Authentication is a significant process that provides strength while attacking. The security of the cloud and IoT must be computationally high. A lightweight authentication using hashing technique is proposed considering the aforementioned condition. The main factor of the authentication involves physically unclonable functions, which are utilized in improving the performance of the authentication. The proposed approach is evaluated with the existing techniques. Results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm provides high robust security.     

Weaknesses and improvements of the Yoon–Ryu–Yoo remote user authentication scheme using smart cards

Remote user authentication scheme is a procedure which allows a server to authenticate a remote user through insecure channel. Recently, Yoon, Ryu and Yoo made an enhancement based on Ku–Chen’s remote user authentication scheme by using smart cards. The scheme has the merits of providing mutual authentication, no verification table, freely choosing password, involving only few hashing operations and parallel session attack resistance. In this paper, we point out security flaws of Yoon–Ryu–Yoo’s protocols against masquerading attack, off-line password guessing attacks and parallel session attack. An improvement to enhance Yoon–Ryu–Yoo’s security scheme is proposed.     

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 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.     

面向多网关的无线传感器网络多因素认证协议

无线传感器网络作为物联网的重要组成部分,广泛应用于环境监测、医疗健康、智能家居等领域.身份认证为用户安全地访问传感器节点中的实时数据提供了基本安全保障,是保障无线传感器网络安全的第一道防线;前向安全性属于系统安全的最后一道防线,能够极大程度地降低系统被攻破后的损失,因此一直被学术及工业界视为重要的安全属性.设计面向多网关的可实现前向安全性的无线传感器网络多因素身份认证协议是近年来安全协议领域的研究热点.由于多网关无线传感器网络身份认证协议往往应用于高安全需求场景,一方面需要面临强大的攻击者,另一方面传感器节点的计算和存储资源却十分有限,这给如何设计一个安全的多网关无线传感器网络身份认证协议带来了挑战.近年来,大量的多网关身份认证协议被提出,但大部分都随后被指出存在各种安全问题.2018年,Ali等人提出了一个适用于农业监测的多因素认证协议,该协议通过一个可信的中心(基站)来实现用户与外部的传感器节点的认证;Srinivas等人提出了一个通用的面向多网关的多因素身份认证协议,该协议不需要一个可信的中心,而是通过在网关之间存储共享秘密参数来完成用户与外部传感器节点的认证.这两个协议是多网关无线传感器网络身份认证协议的典型代表,分别代表了两类实现不同网关间认证的方式:1)基于可信基站,2)基于共享秘密参数.分析指出这两个协议对离线字典猜测攻击、内部攻击是脆弱的,且无法实现匿名性和前向安全性.鉴于此,本文提出一个安全增强的可实现前向安全性的面向多网关的无线传感器网络多因素认证协议.该协议采用Srinivas等协议的认证方式,即通过网关之间的共享秘密参数完成用户与外部传感器节点的认证,包含两种典型的认证场景.对新协议进行了BAN逻辑分析及启发式分析,分析结果表明该协议实现了双向认证,且能够安全地协商会话密钥以及抵抗各类已知的攻击.与相关协议的对比结果显示,新协议在提高安全性的同时,保持了较高的效率,适于资源受限的无线传感器网络环境.