Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

11-2008

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 two-factor 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 smart-card-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.

Keywords

Two-factor authentication, Password, Smart-card, Guessing attack, Dictionary attack

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Journal of Computer and System Sciences

Volume

74

Issue

7

First Page

1160

Last Page

1172

ISSN

0022-0000

Identifier

10.1016/j.jcss.2008.04.002

Publisher

Elsevier

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcss.2008.04.002

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