Cryptanalysis of Sun and Cao's Remote Authentication Scheme with User Anonymity

Dynamic ID-based remote user authentication schemes ensure efficient and anonymous mutual authentication between entities. In 2013, Khan et al. proposed an improved dynamic ID-based authentication scheme to overcome the security flaws of Wang et al.'s authentication scheme. Recently, Sun and Cao showed that Khan et al. does not satisfies the claim of the user's privacy and proposed an efficient authentication scheme with user anonymity. The Sun and Cao's scheme achieve improvement over Khan et al.'s scheme in both privacy and performance point of view. Unfortunately, we identify that Sun and Cao's scheme does not resist password guessing attack. Additionally, Sun and Cao's scheme does not achieve forward secrecy

Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey

With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the development of this area.Comment: add copyright to the tables to the original authors, add acknowledgement to helpe

CALIPER: Continuous Authentication Layered with Integrated PKI Encoding Recognition

Architectures relying on continuous authentication require a secure way to challenge the user's identity without trusting that the Continuous Authentication Subsystem (CAS) has not been compromised, i.e., that the response to the layer which manages service/application access is not fake. In this paper, we introduce the CALIPER protocol, in which a separate Continuous Access Verification Entity (CAVE) directly challenges the user's identity in a continuous authentication regime. Instead of simply returning authentication probabilities or confidence scores, CALIPER's CAS uses live hard and soft biometric samples from the user to extract a cryptographic private key embedded in a challenge posed by the CAVE. The CAS then uses this key to sign a response to the CAVE. CALIPER supports multiple modalities, key lengths, and security levels and can be applied in two scenarios: One where the CAS must authenticate its user to a CAVE running on a remote server (device-server) for access to remote application data, and another where the CAS must authenticate its user to a locally running trusted computing module (TCM) for access to local application data (device-TCM). We further demonstrate that CALIPER can leverage device hardware resources to enable privacy and security even when the device's kernel is compromised, and we show how this authentication protocol can even be expanded to obfuscate direct kernel object manipulation (DKOM) malwares.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2016 Biometrics Worksho