On security of a remote user authentication scheme without using smart cards

The security of a password authentication scheme using smart cards proposed by Rhee et al. is analyzed. A kind of impersonation attack is presented. The analyses show that the scheme is insecure for practical application. In order to eliminate the security vulnerability, an efficient countermeasure is proposed

Enhanced Biometrics-based Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

Authentication and key exchange are fundamental techniques for enabling secure communication over mobile networks. In order to reduce implementation complexity and achieve computation efficiency, design issues for efficient and secure biometrics-based remote user authentication scheme have been extensively investigated by research community in these years. Recently, two well-designed biometrics-based authentication schemes using smart cards are introduced by Li and Hwang and Li et al., respectively. Li and Hwang proposed an efficient biometrics-based remote user authentication scheme using smart card and Li et al. proposed an improvement. The authors of both schemes claimed that their protocol delivers important security features and system functionalities, such as without synchronized clock, freely changes password, mutual authentication, as well as low computation costs. However, these two schemes still have much space for security enhancement. In this paper, we first demonstrate a series of vulnerabilities on these two schemes. Then, an enhanced scheme with corresponding remedies is proposed to eliminate all identified security flaws in both schemes

An Improved Timestamp-Based Password Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

With the recent proliferation of distributed systems and networking, remote authentication has become a crucial task in many networking applications. Various schemes have been proposed so far for the two-party remote authentication; however, some of them have been proved to be insecure. In this paper, we propose an efficient timestamp-based password authentication scheme using smart cards. We show various types of forgery attacks against a previously proposed timestamp-based password authentication scheme and improve that scheme to ensure robust security for the remote authentication process, keeping all the advantages that were present in that scheme. Our scheme successfully defends the attacks that could be launched against other related previous schemes. We present a detailed cryptanalysis of previously proposed Shen et. al scheme and an analysis of the improved scheme to show its improvements and efficiency.Comment: 6 page