An enhanced bilinear pairing based authenticated key agreement protocol for multiserver environment

To circumvent using of multiple single servers, the theory of multiserver communication exists and numerous authentication protocols put forward for providing secure communication. Very recently, Amin‐Biswas proposes bilinear pairing–based multiserver scheme by describing some security pitfalls of Hsieh‐Leu protocol and claims that it is secured against related security threats. However, this paper claims that Amin‐Biswas protocol is still susceptible to off‐line identity and password guessing attack, user untraceability attack, and server masquerading attack. The cryptographic protocol should be attacks‐free for real‐time application. To achieve attacks‐free security, we put forward smart card–based multiserver authentication protocol by using the concept of bilinear pairing operation. The formal method strand space model has been used to prove the correctness of the proposed scheme. Additionally, rigorous security analysis ensures pliability of common security threats. The performance and security features of our scheme are also compared with that of the similar existing schemes. The comparison results show that our protocol achieves more security features with less complexity.     

An efficient three factor–based authentication scheme in multiserver environment using ECC

Recently, Li et al have developed a smartcard‐based remote user authentication scheme in multiserver environment. They have claimed that their scheme is secured against some possible cryptographic attacks. However, we have analyzed that the scheme of Li et al cannot preserve all the proclaimed security goals, which are given as follows: (1) It is not withstanding password‐guessing, user impersonation, insider, and smartcard theft attacks, and (2) it fails to facilitate user anonymity property. To remedy these above‐mentioned security flaws, we have proposed an efficient three factor–based authentication scheme in a multiserver environment using elliptic curve cryptography. The Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic is used to confirm the security validation of our scheme, which ensures that it provides mutual‐authentication and session‐key agreement securely. Then, the random oracle model is also considered to analyze the proposed scheme, and it shows that the backbone parameters, ie, identity, password, biometrics, and the session key, are secure from an adversary. Further, the informal security analysis confirms that the suggested scheme can withstand against some possible mentioned attacks. Later, the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool is incorporated to ensure its security against passive and active attacks. Finally, the performance comparison of the scheme is furnished to confirm its enhanced security with other relevant schemes.     

Secure user authentication scheme with novel server mutual verification for multiserver environments

The fast growth of mobile services and devices has made the conventional single‐server architecture ineffective from the point of its functional requirements. To extend the scalability and availability of mobile services to various applications, it is required to deploy multiserver architecture. In 2016, Moon et al insisted that Lu et al's scheme is weak to insiders and impersonation attack, then they proposed a biometric‐based scheme for authentication and key agreement of users in multiserver environments. Unfortunately, we analyze Moon et al's scheme and demonstrate that their scheme does not withstand various attacks from a malicious registered server. We propose a user authentication scheme with server mutual verification to overcome these security drawbacks. The proposed scheme withstands an attack from malicious insiders in multiserver environments. We use a threshold cryptography to strengthen the process of server authorization and to provide better security functionalities. We then prove the authentication and session key of the proposed scheme using Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham (BAN) logic and show that our proposed scheme is secure against various attacks.     

A lightweight anonymous two‐factor authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV), as the next generation of transportation systems, tries to make highway and public transportation more secure than used to be. In this system, users use public channels for their communication so they can be the victims of passive or active attacks. Therefore, a secure authentication protocol is essential for IoV; consequently, many protocols are presented to provide secure authentication for IoV. In 2018, Yu et al proposed a secure authentication protocol for WSNs in vehicular communications and claimed that their protocol could satisfy all crucial security features of a secure authentication protocol. Unfortunately, we found that their protocol is susceptible to sensor capture attack, user traceability attack, user impersonation attack, and offline sink node's secret key guessing attack. In this paper, we propose a new authentication protocol for IoV which can solve the weaknesses of Yu et al's protocol. Our protocol not only provides anonymous user registration phase and revocation smart card phase but also uses the biometric template in place of the password. We use both Burrow‐Abadi‐Needham (BAN) logic and real‐or‐random (ROR) model to present the formal analysis of our protocol. Finally, we compare our protocol with other existing related protocols in terms of security features and computation overhead. The results prove that our protocol can provide more security features and it is usable for IoV system.     

Privacy‐preserving registration protocol for mobile network

In this paper, we propose a novel privacy‐preserving registration protocol that combines the verifier local revocation group signature with mobile IP. The protocol could achieve strong security guarantee, such as user anonymity via a robust temporary identity, local user revocation with untraceability support, and secure key establishment against home server and eavesdroppers. Various kinds of adversary attacks can be prevented by the proposed protocol, especially that deposit‐case attack does not work here. Meanwhile, a concurrent mechanism and a dynamical revocation method are designed to minimize the handover authentication delay and the home registration signals. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme could provide high security level besides lightweight computational cost and efficient communication performance. For instance, compared with Yang's scheme, the proposed protocol could decrease the falling speed of handover authentication delay up to about 40% with privacy being preserved. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An efficient remote user authentication and key agreement protocol for mobile client–server environment from pairings

With the continue evaluation of mobile devices in terms of the capabilities and services, security concerns increase dramatically. To provide secured communication in mobile client–server environment, many user authentication protocols from pairings have been proposed. In 2009, Goriparthi et al. proposed a new user authentication scheme for mobile client–server environment. In 2010, Wu et al. demonstrated that Goriparthi et al.’s protocol fails to provide mutual authentication and key agreement between the client and the server. To improve security, Wu et al. proposed an improved protocol and demonstrated that their protocol is provably secure in random oracle model. Based on Wu et al.’s work, Yoon et al. proposed another scheme to improve performance. However, their scheme just reduces one hash function operation at the both of client side and the server side. In this paper, we present a new user authentication and key agreement protocol using bilinear pairings for mobile client–server environment. Performance analysis shows that our protocol has better performance than Wu et al.’s protocol and Yoon et al.’s protocol. Then our protocol is more suited for mobile client–server environment. Security analysis is also given to demonstrate that our proposed protocol is provably secure against previous attacks.     

An Improved and Secure Two-factor Dynamic ID Based Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Multiserver Environment

The smart card based password authentication scheme is one of the most important and efficient security mechanism, which is used for providing security to authorized users over an insecure network. In this paper, we analyzed major security flaws of Jangirala et al.’s scheme and proved that it is vulnerable to forgery attack, replay attack, user impersonation attack. Also, Jangirala et al.’s scheme fail to achieve mutual authentication as it claimed. We proposed an improved two factor based dynamic ID based authenticated key agreement protocol for the multiserver environment. The proposed scheme has been simulated using widely accepted AVISPA tool. Furthermore, mutual authentication is proved through BAN logic. The rigorous security and performance analysis depicts that the proposed scheme provides users anonymity, mutual authentication, session key agreement and secure against various active attacks.     

Towards generalized ID‐based user authentication for mobile multi‐server environment

With the popularity of Internet and wireless networks, more and more network architectures are used in multi‐server environment, in which mobile users remotely access servers through open networks. In the past, many schemes have been proposed to solve the issue of user authentication for multi‐server environment and low‐power mobile devices. However, most of these schemes have suffered from many attacks because these schemes did not provide the formal security analysis. In this paper, we first give a security model for multi‐server environment. We then propose an ID‐based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme based on bilinear maps for mobile multi‐server environment. Our scheme can be used for both general users with a long validity period and anonymous users with a short validity period. Under the presented security model, we show that our scheme is secure against all known attacks. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme is well suitable for low‐power mobile devices. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A secure and efficient identity‐based mutual authentication scheme with smart card using elliptic curve cryptography

The e‐commerce has got great development in the past decades and brings great convenience to people. Users can obtain all kinds of services through e‐commerce platform with mobile device from anywhere and at anytime. To make it work well, e‐commerce platform must be secure and provide privacy preserving. To achieve this goal, Islam et al. proposed a dynamic identity‐based remote user mutual authentication scheme with smart card using Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC). Islam et al claimed that the security of their scheme was good enough to resist various attacks. However, we demonstrate that their scheme is vulnerable to insider attack and suffers from off‐line password guessing attack if smart card is compromised. To overcome the deficiencies, we present an improved scheme over Islam's scheme. The security proof and analysis shows that our scheme can also provide user anonymity and mutual authentication, and the security is enough to against relay attack, impersonation attack, and other common secure attackers. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than Islam et al's scheme.     

On the design of secure user authenticated key management scheme for multigateway‐based wireless sensor networks using ECC

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there are many critical applications (for example, healthcare, vehicle tracking, and battlefield), where the online streaming data generated from different sensor nodes need to be analyzed with respect to quick control decisions. However, as the data generated by these sensor nodes usually flow through open channel, so there are higher chances of various types of attacks either on the nodes or on to the data captured by these nodes. In this paper, we aim to design a new elliptic curve cryptography–based user authenticated key agreement protocol in a hierarchical WSN so that a legal user can only access the streaming data from generated from different sensor nodes. The proposed scheme is based upon 3‐factor authentication, as it applies smart card, password, and personal biometrics of a user (for ticket generation). The proposed scheme maintains low computation cost for resource‐constrained sensor nodes, as it uses efficient 1‐way cryptographic hash function and bitwise exclusive‐OR operations for secure key establishment between different sensor nodes. The security analysis using the broadly accepted Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic, formal security verification using the popular simulation tool (automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications), and informal security show that the proposed scheme is resilient against several well‐known attacks needed for a user authentication scheme in WSNs. The comparison of security and functionality requirements, communication and computation costs of the proposed scheme, and other related existing user authentication schemes shows the superior performance of the proposed scheme.     

Strongly secure ID‐based authenticated key agreement protocol for mobile multi‐server environments

To provide mutual authentication and communication confidentiality between mobile clients and servers, numerous identity‐based authenticated key agreement (ID‐AKA) protocols were proposed to authenticate each other while constructing a common session key. In most of the existing ID‐AKA protocols, ephemeral secrets (random values) are involved in the computations of the common session key between mobile client and server. Thus, these ID‐AKA protocols might become vulnerable because of the ephemeral‐secret‐leakage (ESL) attacks in the sense that if the involved ephemeral secrets are compromised, an adversary could compute session keys and reveal the private keys of participants in an AKA protocol. Very recently, 2 ID‐AKA protocols were proposed to withstand the ESL attacks. One of them is suitable for single server environment and requires no pairing operations on the mobile client side. The other one fits multi‐server environments, but requires 2 expensive pairing operations. In this article, we present a strongly secure ID‐AKA protocol resisting ESL attacks under mobile multi‐server environments. By performance analysis and comparisons, we demonstrate that our protocol requires the lowest communication overhead, does not require any pairing operations, and is well suitable for mobile devices with limited computing capability. For security analysis, our protocol is provably secure under the computational Diffie‐Hellman assumption in the random oracle model.     

An independent three‐factor mutual authentication and key agreement scheme with privacy preserving for multiserver environment and a survey

In the past decades, the demand for remote mutual authentication and key agreement (MAKA) scheme with privacy preserving grows rapidly with the rise of the right to privacy and the development of wireless networks and Internet of Things (IoT). Numerous remote MAKA schemes are proposed for various purposes, and they have different properties. In this paper, we survey 49 three‐factor–based remote MAKA schemes with privacy preserving from 2013 to 2019. None of them can simultaneously achieve security, suitability for multiserver environments, user anonymity, user untraceability, table free, public key management free, and independent authentication. Therefore, we propose an efficient three‐factor MAKA scheme, which achieves all the properties. We propose a security model of a three‐factor–based MAKA scheme with user anonymity for multiserver environments and formally prove that our scheme is secure under the elliptic curve computational Diffie‐Hellman problem assumption, decisional bilinear Diffie‐Hellman problem assumption, and hash function assumption. We compare the proposed scheme to relevant schemes to show our contribution and also show that our scheme is sufficiently efficient for low‐power portable mobile devices.     

User centric three‐factor authentication protocol for cloud‐assisted wearable devices

Wearable devices, which provide the services of collecting personal data, monitoring health conditions, and so on, are widely used in many fields, ranging from sports to healthcare. Although wearable devices bring convenience to people's lives, they bring about significant security concerns, such as personal privacy disclosure and unauthorized access to wearable devices. To ensure the privacy and security of the sensitive data, it is critical to design an efficient authentication protocol suitable for wearable devices. Recently, Das et al proposed a lightweight authentication protocol, which achieves secure communication between the wearable device and the mobile terminal. However, we find that their protocol is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and desynchronization attack. Therefore, we put forward a user centric three‐factor authentication scheme for wearable devices assisted by cloud server. Informal security analysis and formal analysis using ProVerif is executed to demonstrate that our protocol not only remedies the flaws of the protocol of Das et al but also meets desired security properties. Comparison with related schemes shows that our protocol satisfies security and usability simultaneously.     

An improved lightweight multiserver authentication scheme

Multiserver authentication complies with the up‐to‐date requirements of Internet services and latest applications. The multiserver architecture enables the expedient authentication of subscribers on an insecure channel for the delivery of services. The users rely on a single registration of a trusted third party for the procurement of services from various servers. Recently, Chen and Lee, Moon et al, and Wang et al presented multiserver key agreement schemes that are found to be vulnerable to many attacks according to our analysis. The Chen and Lee scheme was found susceptible to impersonation attack, trace attack, stolen smart card attack exposing session key, key‐compromise impersonation attack, and inefficient password modification. The Moon et al is susceptible to stolen card attack leading to further attacks, ie, identity guessing, key‐compromise impersonation attack, user impersonation attack, and session keys disclosure, while Wang et al is also found to be prone to trace attack, session‐specific temporary information attack, key‐compromise information attack, and privileged insider attack leading to session key disclosure and user impersonation attacks. We propose an improved protocol countering the indicated weaknesses of these schemes in an equivalent cost. Our scheme demonstrates automated and security analysis on the basis of Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic and also presents the performance evaluation for related schemes.     

A chaotic map‐based anonymous multi‐server authenticated key agreement protocol using smart card

Authenticated key agreement protocols play an important role for network‐connected servers to authenticate remote users in Internet environment. In recent years, several authenticated key agreement protocols for single‐server environment have been developed based on chaotic maps. In modern societies, people usually have to access multiple websites or enterprise servers to accomplish their daily personal matters or duties on work; therefore, how to increase user's convenience by offering multi‐server authentication protocol becomes a practical research topic. In this study, a novel chaotic map‐based anonymous multi‐server authenticated key agreement protocol using smart card is proposed. In this protocol, a legal user can access multiple servers using only a single secret key obtained from a trusted third party, known as the registration center. Security analysis shows this protocol is secure against well‐known attacks. In addition, protocol efficiency analysis is conducted by comparing the proposed protocol with two recently proposed schemes in terms of computational cost during one authentication session. We have shown that the proposed protocol is twice faster than the one proposed by Khan and He while preserving the same security properties as their protocol has. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Secure multi‐factor remote user authentication scheme for Internet of Things environments

Because of the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT), several services are being developed. These services can be accessed through smart gadgets by the user at any place, every time and anywhere. This makes security and privacy central to IoT environments. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, robust, and multi‐factor remote user authentication and key agreement scheme for IoT environments. Using this protocol, any authorized user can access and gather real‐time sensor data from the IoT nodes. Before gaining access to any IoT node, the user must first get authenticated by the gateway node as well as the IoT node. The proposed protocol is based on XOR and hash operations, and includes: (i) a 3‐factor authentication (ie, password, biometrics, and smart device); (ii) mutual authentication ; (iii) shared session key ; and (iv) key freshness . It satisfies desirable security attributes and maintains acceptable efficiency in terms of the computational overheads for resource constrained IoT environment. Further, the informal and formal security analysis using AVISPA proves security strength of the protocol and its robustness against all possible security threats. Simulation results also prove that the scheme is secure against attacks.     

An ID‐based mutual authentication with key agreement protocol for multiserver environment on elliptic curve cryptosystem

Mutual authentication is used to validate the legitimacy of a remote login user and a server. Conventional user authentication protocols are suited to solve the privacy and security problems for the single client/server architecture environment. However, the use of computer networks and information technology has grown spectacularly. More and more network architectures are used in multi‐server environments. Recently, several authentication schemes for multi‐server environments have been proposed. However, the performance of these schemes is not suitable for applications. To improve the performance, we propose a new ID‐based mutual authentication protocols for multi‐server environment without bilinear pairings. We also show that the proposed scheme is provable secure in the random oracle model. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An anonymous and robust multi‐server authentication protocol using multiple registration servers

The concept of multi‐server authentication includes multiple numbers of application servers. The registration/control server is the central point in such environment to provide smooth services to a limited number of legitimate users. However, this type of environment is inappropriate to handle unlimited users since the number of users may grow, and thus, the response time may be very high. To eliminate these shortcomings, we have modified the existing multi‐server authentication architecture and then designed a new scheme by including multiregistration server technique that can provide a smooth environment to support unlimited number of users. The main aspect of our design is to provide a secure authentication environment for multi‐server application using password and smartcard so that the participants can securely communicate with each other. The simulation results are obtained by executing our protocol using AVISPA tool. The results provide concrete evidence about the security safety against active and passive attacks. Furthermore, the justification of correctness of the freshness of the session key negotiation and the mutual authentication between the participants has done been evaluated with the BAN logic model. The comprehensive comparative analysis justifies our argument that our protocol has better applicability in multi‐server environments compared to other protocols with similar nature.     

Revised anonymous authentication protocol for adaptive client‐server infrastructure

Rapid evolution in information and communication technologies has facilitated us to experience mobile communication in our daily routine. Mobile user can only avail the services from the server, once he/she is able to accomplish authentication process successfully. In the recent past, several researchers have contributed diverse authentication protocols for mobile client‐server environment. Currently, Lu et al designed two‐factor protocol for authenticating mobile client and server to exchange key between them. Lu et al emphasized that their scheme not only offers invincibility against potential security threats but also offers anonymity. Although this article reveals the facts that their protocol is vulnerable against client and server impersonation, man‐in‐the‐middle, server key breach, anonymity violation, client traceability, and session‐specific temporary attacks, therefore, we have enhanced their protocol to mitigate the above mention vulnerabilities. The enhanced protocol's security strength is evaluated through formal and informal security analysis. The security analysis and performance comparison endorses the fact that our protocol is able to offer more security with least possible computation complexity.