Weaknesses of Lee-Li-Hwang's hash-based password authentication scheme

Abstract

Many password authentication schemes employ hash functions as their basic building blocks to achieve better efficiency. In 2000, Peyravian and Zunic proposed a hash-based password authentication scheme that is efficient and can be easily implemented. Recently, Lee, Li, and Hwang demonstrated that Peyravian-Zunic's hash-based password authentication scheme is vulnerable to the off-line guessing attack, and then proposed an improved version. In this article, we show that their improved scheme is still vulnerable to the of-line guessing attack, the denial-of-service attack, and the stolen-verifier attack.Password authentication is regarded as one of the simplest and most convenient authentication mechanisms. Conventional static password authentication methods can not resist direct wiretapping attacks, and thus, are unsuitable for open network environments. To meet today's security requirements, many password authentication methods using dynamic, or one-time, passwords have been proposed . Existing dynamic one-time password authentication schemes can be categorized into two types, one [3] employs cryptosystems, either public-key cryptosystems or secret-key cryptosystems, and the other [4,9,11,15,16,17] employs only simple operations, e.g., one-way hash function [12,14,18] and XOR (exclusive-or) operation. Although the latter type, the hash-based password authentication scheme, usually requires that users should choose strong passwords, which can not be easily guessed, however, it has the advantage over the former type in that its computation is lighter, design is simpler, and implementation is easier, and therefore is especially suitable for certain constrained environments.The first well-known hash-based password authentication scheme was proposed by Lamport [9] . This scheme allows the server to authenticate the user in a way that neither eavesdropping on an authentication exchange nor reading server's database enables someone to impersonate the user. However, high hash overhead and the necessity for password resetting decrease its suitability for practical use. Additionally, Lamport's scheme is vulnerable to the replay attack . Later, Haller [4]

Complementary Scheme of Remote User Access over Insecure Networks

“…In this case, they commonly require additional overhead on the local and remote application programs. Unlike the typical remote user authentication and password change protocols, some user authentication protocols use only collision-resistant one-way hash functions to protect the secrecy of passwords while transmitting over the public network [2,5,6,7,9,10,11].…”

A Secure Remote User Authentication Scheme

“…Unlike the typical remote user authentication and password change protocols, some user authentication protocols use only collision-resistant one-way hash functions [5,6,8,9,12]. Hash functions take an input string and convert it into an output string from which the input string cannot be determined.…”

A novel remote user authentication scheme using bilinear pairings

“…Later, Shimizu et al (1998) overcome the weakness of Lamport (1981) and proposed a modified scheme. Thereafter, many schemes and improvements (Lee et al, 2002;Peyravian and Zunic, 2000;Ku et al, 2003;Ku, 2004) on hash-based remote user authentication, have been proposed. These schemes take low computation cost and are computationally viable for implementation in a handheld device like smart card; however, the schemes primarily suffer from password guessing, stolen-verifier and denial-of-service attacks (Ku et al, 2003;Hsieh et al, 2003).…”

“…So far, several research works on public-key based remote user authentication (Chang and Wu, 1993;Chang and Liao, 1994;Hwang and Yeh, 2002;Shen et al, 2003) have been done. Unfortunately, many times, a paper typically breaks a previous scheme and proposes a new one (Ku et al, 2003;Hsieh et al, 2003), which someone breaks later and, in turn, proposes a new one, and so on. Most of such work, though quite important and useful, essentially provides an incremental advance to the same basic theme (Peyravian and Zunic, 2000).…”