An improved lightweight multiserver authentication scheme

Multiserver authentication complies with the up‐to‐date requirements of Internet services and latest applications. The multiserver architecture enables the expedient authentication of subscribers on an insecure channel for the delivery of services. The users rely on a single registration of a trusted third party for the procurement of services from various servers. Recently, Chen and Lee, Moon et al, and Wang et al presented multiserver key agreement schemes that are found to be vulnerable to many attacks according to our analysis. The Chen and Lee scheme was found susceptible to impersonation attack, trace attack, stolen smart card attack exposing session key, key‐compromise impersonation attack, and inefficient password modification. The Moon et al is susceptible to stolen card attack leading to further attacks, ie, identity guessing, key‐compromise impersonation attack, user impersonation attack, and session keys disclosure, while Wang et al is also found to be prone to trace attack, session‐specific temporary information attack, key‐compromise information attack, and privileged insider attack leading to session key disclosure and user impersonation attacks. We propose an improved protocol countering the indicated weaknesses of these schemes in an equivalent cost. Our scheme demonstrates automated and security analysis on the basis of Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic and also presents the performance evaluation for related schemes.     

Analysis and Improvement of a Robust Smart Card Based-Authentication Scheme for Multi-Server Architecture

Recently, Pippal et al. proposed an authentication scheme for multi-server architecture and claimed that their scheme had many advantages compared to the previous schemes, such as security, reliability, etc. In this paper, we reanalyze the security of their scheme and demonstrate that their scheme is vulnerable to impersonation attack even if the adversary doesn’t know the information stored in the user’s smart card. Moreover, the adversary can proceed off-line password guessing attack if the user’s smart card is compromised. In order to eliminate those shortcomings, we propose an improved multi-server authentication scheme which can preserve user anonymity. We demonstrate the completeness of the proposed scheme through the BAN logic. Compared with other related protocols, the security analysis and performance evaluation show that our proposed scheme can provide stronger security.     

Security Enhanced Anonymous User Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme Using Smart Card

Nowadays, the password-based remote user authentication mechanism using smart card is one of the simplest and convenient authentication ways to ensure secure communications over the public network environments. Recently, Liu et al. proposed an efficient and secure smart card based password authentication scheme. However, we find that Liu et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to the off-line password guessing attack and user impersonation attack. Furthermore, it also cannot provide user anonymity. In this paper, we cryptanalyze Liu et al.’s scheme and propose a security enhanced user authentication scheme to overcome the aforementioned problems. Especially, in order to preserve the user anonymity and prevent the guessing attack, we use the dynamic identity technique. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more secure and efficient than other related authentication schemes.     

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.     

A Provably Secure Multi-server Based Authentication Scheme

With the rapid growth of electronic commerce and demand on variants of Internet based applications, the system providing resources and business services often consists of many servers around the world. So far, a variety of authentication schemes have been published to achieve remote user authentication on multi-server communication environment. Recently, Pippal et al. proposed a multi-server based authentication protocol to pursue the system security and computation efficiency. Nevertheless, based on our analysis, the proposed scheme is insecure against user impersonation attack, server counterfeit attack, and man-in-the-middle attack. In this study, we first demonstrate how these malicious attacks can be invoked by an adversary. Then, a security enhanced authentication protocol is developed to eliminate all identified weaknesses. Meanwhile, the proposed protocol can achieve the same order of computation complexity as Pippal et al.’s protocol does.     

Cryptanalysis and improvement of ‘an improved authentication with key agreement scheme on elliptic curve cryptosystem for global mobility networks’

Authentication schemes assure that authorised user can fraudulently obtain his/her required services from home domains. Recently, Li et al. (International Journal of Network Management, 2013; 23(5):311–324) proposed a remote user authentication scheme. They claimed that their protocol is secure against known security attacks. However, in this paper, we indicate that Li et al.'s scheme is insecure against user impersonation attack. We show that an active adversary can easily masquerade as a legitimate user without knowing the user's secret information. As a remedy, we also proposed an improved authentication scheme to overcome the security weaknesses of Li et al.'s scheme. To show the security of our scheme, we prove its security the random oracle model. The implementation results show that our improved scheme offers a reduction of 58% in computational cost and a communication cost reduction of 48% with respect to Li et al.'s scheme. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis and improvement on identity-based cloud data integrity verification scheme

Many individuals or businesses outsource their data to remote cloud.Cloud storage provides users the advantages of economic convenience,but data owners no longer physically control over the stored data,which introduces new security challenges,such as no security guarantees of integrity and privacy.The security of two identity-based cloud data integrity verification schemes by Zhang et al and Xu et al respectively are analysed.It shows that Zhang et al.’s scheme is subjected to secret key recovery attack for the cloud servers can recover user’s private key only utilizing stored data.And Xu et al.’s scheme cannot satisfy security requirements of soundness.Based on Xu et al.'s scheme,a modified identity-based cloud data integrity verification scheme is proposed.A comprehensive analysis shows the new scheme can provide the security requirements of soundness and privacy,and has the same communication overhead and computational cost as Xu et al.’s scheme.     

Cryptanalysis and improvement of ‘a robust smart‐card‐based remote user password authentication scheme’

With the use of smart card in user authentication mechanisms, the concept of two‐factor authentication came into existence. This was a forward move towards more secure and reliable user authentication systems. It elevated the security level by requiring a user to possess something in addition to know something. In 2010, Sood et al. and Song independently examined a smart‐card‐based authentication scheme proposed by Xu et al. They showed that in the scheme of Xu et al., an internal user of the system can turn hostile to impersonate other users of the system. Both of them also proposed schemes to improve the scheme of Xu et al. Recently, Chen et al. identified some security problems in the improved schemes proposed by Sood et al. and Song. To fix these problems, Chen et al. presented another scheme, which they claimed to provide mutual authentication and withstand lost smart card attack. Undoubtedly, in their scheme, a user can also verify the legitimacy of server, but we find that the scheme fails to resist impersonation attacks and privileged insider attack. We also show that the scheme does not provide important features such as user anonymity, confidentiality to air messages, and revocation of lost/stolen smart card. Besides, the scheme defies the very purpose of two‐factor security. Furthermore, an attacker can guess a user's password from his or her lost/stolen smart card. To meet these challenges, we propose a user authentication method with user anonymity. We show through analysis and comparison that the proposed scheme exhibits enhanced efficiency in contrast to related schemes, including the scheme of Chen et al. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

A secure and effective biometric‐based user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks using smart card and fuzzy extractor

User authentication is a prominent security requirement in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for accessing the real‐time data from the sensors directly by a legitimate user (external party). Several user authentication schemes are proposed in the literature. However, most of them are either vulnerable to different known attacks or they are inefficient. Recently, Althobaiti et al. presented a biometric‐based user authentication scheme for WSNs. Although their scheme is efficient in computation, in this paper, we first show that their scheme has several security pitfalls such as (i) it is not resilient against node capture attack; (ii) it is insecure against impersonation attack; and (iii) it is insecure against man‐in‐the‐middle attack. We then aim to propose a novel biometric‐based user authentication scheme suitable for WSNs in order to withstand the security pitfalls found in Althobaiti et al. scheme. We show through the rigorous security analysis that our scheme is secure and satisfies the desirable security requirements. Furthermore, the simulation results for the formal security verification using the most widely used and accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool indicate that our scheme is secure. Our scheme is also efficient compared with existing related schemes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Secure and Effective Anonymous User Authentication Scheme for Roaming Service in Global Mobility Networks

In global mobility networks, anonymous user authentication is an essential task for enabling roaming service. In a recent paper, Jiang et al. proposed a smart card based anonymous user authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobility networks. This scheme can protect user privacy and is believed to have many abilities to resist a range of network attacks, even if the secret information stored in the smart card is compromised. In this paper, we analyze the security of Jiang et al.’s scheme, and show that the scheme is in fact insecure against the stolen-verifier attack and replay attack. Then, we also propose a new smart card based anonymous user authentication scheme for roaming service. Compared with the existing schemes, our protocol uses a different user authentication mechanism, which does not require the home agent to share a static secret key with the foreign agent, and hence, it is more practical and realistic. We show that our proposed scheme can provide stronger security than previous protocols.     

An improved authentication with key agreement scheme on elliptic curve cryptosystem for global mobility networks

In this paper, we cryptanalyze Rhee et al.'s ‘Remote user authentication scheme without using smart cards’, and prove that their scheme is not completely secure against user impersonation attack. The security flaw is caused by mathematical homomorphism of the registration information. In addition, their scheme lacks key agreement procedures for generating the session key to encrypt the communication messages after mutual authentication. Furthermore, a modification is proposed to improve the security, practicability and robustness of such scheme. Firstly, we introduce elliptic curve cryptosystem to enhance the security. Secondly, in order to improve the practicability, our improvement is much more easily implemented using portable devices in global mobility networks; moreover, a synchronized clock system, traditional password table or ancillary equipment are not required in our improvement. Finally, the proposed scheme not only achieves mutual authentication, but also provides the procedure for key agreement and update of secrets for users and servers to increase the robustness. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

A New Lightweight User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for WSN

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most up-to-date and newest technologies that allows remote control of heterogeneous networks and has a good outlook for industrial applications. Wireless sensor networks (or in brief WSNs) have a key role on the Internet of industrial objects. Due to the limited resources of the sensor nodes, designing a balanced authentication scheme to provide security in reasonable performance in wireless sensor networks is a major challenge in these applications. So far, several security schemes have been presented in this context, but unfortunately, none of these schemes have provided desired security in reasonable cost. In 2017, Khemissa et al. proposed a security protocol for mutual authentication between sensor node and user in WSNs, however, in this paper we show that this protocol is not safe enough in the confrontation of desynchronization, user impersonation and gateway impersonation attacks. The proposed attacks succeed with the probability of one and to be realized only require an execution of the protocol. Given merits of the Khemissa et al.’s protocol, we also improved their protocol in such a way that provides suitable level of security, and also we prove its security using two formal ways, i.e. BAN logic and also the Scyther tool. We also argue informally about the improved protocol’s security.

     

A secure and efficient identity‐based mutual authentication scheme with smart card using elliptic curve cryptography

The e‐commerce has got great development in the past decades and brings great convenience to people. Users can obtain all kinds of services through e‐commerce platform with mobile device from anywhere and at anytime. To make it work well, e‐commerce platform must be secure and provide privacy preserving. To achieve this goal, Islam et al. proposed a dynamic identity‐based remote user mutual authentication scheme with smart card using Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC). Islam et al claimed that the security of their scheme was good enough to resist various attacks. However, we demonstrate that their scheme is vulnerable to insider attack and suffers from off‐line password guessing attack if smart card is compromised. To overcome the deficiencies, we present an improved scheme over Islam's scheme. The security proof and analysis shows that our scheme can also provide user anonymity and mutual authentication, and the security is enough to against relay attack, impersonation attack, and other common secure attackers. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than Islam et al's scheme.     

A novel user’s authentication scheme for pervasive on-line media services

Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and the pervasion of multimedia, protection of intellectual property (IP) rights of digital content in transactions induces people’s concerns. Current security requirements and copyright protection mechanisms especially need to work in real-time and on-line for communication and networking. For media service systems in the Internet, user’s authentication is most essential in association with the access control of the media system. The authentication scheme is a trivial but crucial issue for maintaining user’s information. Up to now, many one-time password-based authentication schemes have been proposed. However, none is secure enough. The purpose of a one-time password (OTP) is to make it more difficult to gain unauthorized access to restricted resources. Traditionally static passwords can more easily be obtained by an unauthorized intruder given enough attempts and time. By constantly altering the password, as is done with a one-time password, this risk can be greatly reduced. These schemes are specially fit for media services in the Internet since they will frustrate the attacker’s attempt. Lin, Shen and Hwang proposed a strong-password authentication scheme in association with one-time password by using smart cards, and claimed their scheme can resist guess attack, replay attack, impersonation attack and stolen attack. Later, Ku, Tsai, and Chen showed that Lin-Shen-Hwang’s scheme suffers from a replay attack and a denial-of-service attack. Furthermore, Ku proposed a hash-based strong-password authentication scheme to enhance the security. In this paper, we show the weaknesses and devise some attacks against Ku’s scheme. Then, we revise Ku’s scheme and propose a novel user’s authentication scheme in pervasive on-line media services for current communication and networking.     

层次身份基认证密钥协商方案的安全性分析和改进

该文分析了曹晨磊等人(2014)提出的层次身份基认证密钥协商方案的安全性,指出该方案无法抵抗基本假冒攻击。文中具体描述了对该方案实施基本假冒攻击的过程,分析了原安全性证明的疏漏和方案无法抵抗该攻击的原因。然后,在BONEH等人(2005)层次身份基加密方案基础上提出了一种改进方案。最后,在BJM模型中,给出了所提方案的安全性证明。复杂度分析表明所提方案在效率上同原方案基本相当。     

Security flaws in two improved remote user authentication schemes using smart cards

Understanding security failures of cryptographic protocols is the key to both patching existing protocols and designing future schemes. In this paper, we analyze two recent proposals in the area of password‐based remote user authentication using smart cards. First, we point out that the scheme of Chen et al. cannot achieve all the claimed security goals and report its following flaws: (i) it is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack under their nontamper resistance assumption of the smart cards; and (ii) it fails to provide forward secrecy. Then, we analyze an efficient dynamic ID‐based scheme without public‐key operations introduced by Wen and Li in 2012. This proposal attempts to overcome many of the well‐known security and efficiency shortcomings of previous schemes and supports more functionalities than its counterparts. Nevertheless, Wen–Li's protocol is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and denial of service attack, and fails to provide forward secrecy and to preserve user anonymity. Furthermore, with the security analysis of these two schemes and our previous protocol design experience, we put forward three general principles that are vital for designing secure smart‐card‐based password authentication schemes: (i) public‐key techniques are indispensable to resist against offline password guessing attack and to preserve user anonymity under the nontamper resistance assumption of the smart card; (ii) there is an unavoidable trade‐off when fulfilling the goals of local password update and resistance to smart card loss attack; and (iii) at least two exponentiation (respectively elliptic curve point multiplication) operations conducted on the server side are necessary for achieving forward secrecy. The cryptanalysis results discourage any practical use of the two investigated schemes and are important for security engineers to make their choices correctly, whereas the proposed three principles are valuable to protocol designers for advancing more robust schemes. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于身份密码的机载自组织网络动态密钥管理

针对现有机载自组织网络密钥管理存在的预分配密钥更新困难、公钥证书传递开销大、分布式身份密钥传递需要安全信道的问题,该文提出一种无需安全信道的基于身份密码体制的动态密钥管理方案。该方案包括系统密钥自组织生成和用户私钥分布式管理两个算法;采取遮蔽密钥的办法,确保私钥在公共信道中全程安全传递,使得密钥管理易于部署、方便扩展;最后分析了方案的正确性与安全性。结果证明方案理论正确,能够抵抗假冒、重放、中间人攻击。