Two-factor mutual authentication based on smart cards and passwords

Abstract

One of the most commonly used two-factor user authentication mechanisms nowadays is based on smart-card and password. A scheme of this type is called a smart-card-based password authentication scheme. The core feature of such a scheme is to enforce twofactor authentication in the sense that the client must have the smart-card and know the password in order to gain access to the server. In this paper, we scrutinize the security requirements of this kind of schemes, and propose a new scheme and a generic construction framework for smart-card-based password authentication. We show that a secure password based key exchange protocol can be efficiently transformed to a smartcard-based password authentication scheme provided that there exist pseudorandom functions and target collision resistant hash functions. Our construction appears to be the first one with provable security. In addition, we show that two recently proposed schemes of this kind are insecure.

Breaking a Robust Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

“…Note that the above two assumptions, which are also made in the latest works [7,9,10], are indeed reasonable: (1) Assumption i is accordant with the common adversary model introduced in Section 1; and (2) Assumption ii is also practical in consideration of the state-of-art side-channel attack techniques [12][13][14]. In the following discussions of the security flaws of Yeh et al's scheme, based on the above two assumptions, we assume that  can extract the secret values {V, R, b} stored in the legitimate user's smart card, and the attacker can also intercept or block the login request message {C 2 , h(ID i ), T u } from U i and the reply message {C 3 , T s } from S. As described in Yeh et al's scheme, mainly two countermeasures are employed to remedy the identified flaws in Hsiang and Shih's scheme: (1) user's ID is concealed by use of a non-invertible hash function to double the difficulty of mounting an offline password guessing attack; (2) a session key is agreed to resist against server impersonation attack.…”

“…This seminal scheme was later refined and used in a number of applications, notably Haller's famous S/KEY onetime password system [4]. Later on, Chang and Wu [5] introduced the smart cards into remote user authentication schemes, since then there have been many smart card based password authentication schemes proposed [6][7][8][9][10]. In such schemes, the user is equipped with a smart card and a password as identification verifiers.…”

“…The common adversary model to evaluate the security of authentication protocols using smart cards assumes an attacker with full control over the communication channel between the user and the remote server [7,10,11]. Accordingly, all the messages exchanged can be blocked, intercepted, deleted, or modified by the attacker, and the attacker can also insert his/her own fabricated messages.…”

Offline Dictionary Attack on Password Authentication Schemes Using Smart Cards

“…Now that smart cards can be tampered, why we do not choose cheap USB memory sticks instead of expensive smart cards? Or equally, what's the rationale under these propositions [20,25,31,50,51,55,57,59] that endeavor to construct two-factor authentication schemes using non-tamper resistant smart cards rather than memory sticks? To the best of our knowledge, until now, little attention has been given to this question.…”

“…To identify the differences in security provisions offered by two-factor authentication schemes using these two different devices, we need to discuss the realistic capabilities that an attacker may have under these two different authentication environments. On the basis of the studies [50,54,57,59], the following assumptions are made on the capabilities of the adversary M in the smart-card-based environment: S(i) M can fully control the communication channel between the user and the server. In other words, she can inject, modify, block, and delete messages exchanged in the channel at will.…”