Remote user authentication has become an essential part in e-commerce and mobile-commerce to provide security over the Internet. Recently, Chung et al. proposed a very robust and complicated authentication scheme for resource-limited devices using non-tamper-resistant smart cards with many merits. However, in this paper, we will show that Chung et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to the generic man-in-the-middle attack, and thus it fails to achieve mutual authentication. We will then present an improved simple and elegant scheme to get rid of its weaknesses while retaining all of its merits. One of the promising features of our scheme is that it simply applies the Diffie-Hellman key agreement mechanism to achieve mutual authentication, session key exchange, and perfect forward secrecy.
Remote user authentication has become an essential part in e-commerce and mobile-commerce to provide security over the Internet. Recently, Chung et al. proposed a very robust and complicated authentication scheme for resource-limited devices using non-tamper-resistant smart cards with many merits. However, in this paper, we will show that Chung et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to the generic man-in-the-middle attack, and thus it fails to achieve mutual authentication. We will then present an improved simple and elegant scheme to get rid of its weaknesses while retaining all of its merits. One of the promising features of our scheme is that it simply applies the Diffie-Hellman key agreement mechanism to achieve mutual authentication, session key exchange, and perfect forward secrecy.
Remote user authentication is an essential part in electronic commerce to identify legitimate users over the Internet. However, how to protect user privacy in the authentication has become an important issue recently. Therefore, many secure authentication schemes with smart cards have been proposed. In this paper, we will analyze the security weaknesses of two recently proposed authentication schemes for preserving user privacy. First, Chang et al. (2011) proposed a robust and efficient remote user authentication scheme to provide user anonymity. However, this scheme fails to protect user privacy in terms of anonymity and traceability. In addition, it is vulnerable to the server counterfeit attack and it does not provide perfect forward secrecy for session keys. Furthermore, if the smart card is lost, it will suffer from the offline password guessing attack as well as the user impersonation attack. Second, Wen and Li (2012) recently presented an improved dynamic ID-based authentication scheme with key agreement. However, this scheme is vulnerable to traceability. In addition, it does not support perfect forward secrecy for session keys. Furthermore, the insecure offline password change phase and online secret renewal phase will result in the denial of service attack.
Rapid growth of mobile and networking technologies, resulted in new paradigms of networking like Internet of Things (IoT) etc, which allows user to connect to insecure public communication channel through various devices and can access the services and data provided by remote server. Thus, remote user authentication and key agreement for wireless, wired, IoT communications becoming more challenging task. In this context many researchers have proposed authentication schemes. In 2013, An et al. proposed a dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme which is secure, even if the secret values stored in the smart card is revealed. In 2014, Troung et al claimed that An et al scheme is vulnerable to server forgery attack and proposed an improved scheme. In this manuscript, we validate that Troung et al's scheme is vulnerable to known session specific temporary information attack, replay and impersonation attack. Furthermore, we also propose the improved scheme to overcome these limitations without increase in the cost front.
In this article, the authors have proposed a secure two-factor remote user authentication and session key agreement protocol. As they have shown in the presented scheme, is precise and secure according to both formal and informal security analysis. For formal security analysis, they have applied BAN (Burrows-Abadi-Needham) logic which certifies that the presented scheme provides the amenity of mutual authentication and session key agreement safely. The informal security verification has shown that the proposed scheme is more vigorous against various sort of cruel threats. Moreover, the authors have simulated the presented scheme using broadly accepted AVISPA tool, whose simulation results make sure that the protocol is not dangerous from active and passive attacks together with replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. In addition, the performance evaluation and the security comparison have revealed that the presented scheme gives strong security as well as better complexity in the context of smart card memory requirement, communication cost and computation cost.
In recent years, the Internet of things (IoT) has become an encouraging communication paradigm that has numerous applications including smart city, smart home and intelligent transportation system. The information sensed by several IoT smart devices can be security stored at the (cloud) servers. An external user, being a client, can access the services from a server for the sensing information, provided that a mutual authentication happens among them. Using the established session key among the user and the server, encrypted information with the help of session key can be delivered to the user by the server securely. Recently, Rana et al. proposed a smart-card based remote user authentication scheme using user password. In this comment paper, we carefully analyzed the scheme of Rana et al. and tracked down that their scheme is insecure against serious attacks, including stolen smart card attack, privileged-insider attack, user impersonation attack, password change attack and Ephemeral Secret Leakage (ESL) attack. Furthermore, their scheme does not preserve untraceability feature. To remedy these security pitfalls, we also provide some remedies that can help in building more secure and effective user authentication scheme to apply in securing next generation IoT infrastructure.
In 2006, Shieh and Wang proposed a remote mutual authentication and key agreement scheme, in which a user can login to a remote server with his password and smartcard. In Shieh and Wang’s scheme, it requires only hash functions operations during the login and key agreement phase. However, Holbl et al. demonstrated some attacks on Shieh and Wang’s scheme and proposed an improved scheme to overcome the shown attacks in 2010. In this paper, we point out that Holbl et al.’s proposed scheme is still vulnerable to an offline password guessing and forgery attack. In addition, Holbl et al.’s scheme fails to achieve explicit key authentication. We propose a robust remote mutual authentication scheme with key agreement to resist against above mentioned attacks and provide more security requirements.