In this paper, we analyze four authentication protocols of Bindu et al., Goriparthi et al., Wang et al. and Hölbl et al.. After investigation, we reveal several weaknesses of these schemes. First, Bindu et al.'s protocol suffers from an insider impersonation attack if a malicious user obtains a lost smart card. Second, both Goriparthi et al.'s and Wang et al.'s protocols cannot withstand a DoS attack in the password change phase, i.e. an attacker can involve the phase to make user's password never be used in subsequent authentications. Third, Hölbl et al.'s protocol is vulnerable to an insider attack since a legal but malevolent user can deduce KGC's secret key.
In 2010, Grigoriev and Shpilrain, introduced some graph-based authentication schemes. We present a cryptanalysis of some of these protocols, and introduce some new schemes to fix the problems.
Remote user authentication is desirable for a Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) to verify the correctness of remote users and server over the insecure channel. We propose an authentication scheme for TMIS.
Remote user authentication is critical requirement in Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS) to protect the patient personal details, security and integrity of the critical medical records of the patient as the patient data is transmitted over insecure public communication channel called Internet. In 2013, Yan proposed a biometric based remote user authentication scheme and claimed that his scheme is secure. Recently, Dheerendra et al. demonstrated some drawbacks in Yan et al scheme and proposed an improved scheme to erase the drawbacks of Yan et al scheme. We analyze Dheerendra et al sch…
Song \cite{Song10} proposed very recently a password-based authentication and key establishment protocol using smart cards which attempts to solve some weaknesses found in a previous scheme suggested by Xu, Zhu, and Feng \cite{XZF09}. In this paper, we present attacks on the improved protocol, showing that it fails to achieve the claimed security goals.
Dynamic ID-based remote user authentication schemes ensure efficient and anonymous mutual authentication between entities. In 2013, Khan et al. proposed an improved dynamic ID-based authentication scheme to overcome the security flaws of Wang et al.'s authentication scheme. Recently, Sun and Cao showed that Khan et al. does not satisfies the claim of the user's privacy and proposed an efficient authentication scheme with user anonymity. The Sun and Cao's scheme achieve improvement over Khan et al.'s scheme in both privacy and performance point of view. Unfortunately, we identify that Sun and C…
Telecare medical information systems (TMIS) aim to provide healthcare services remotely. Efficient and secure mechanism for authentication and key agreement is required in order to guarantee the security and privacy of patients in TMIS.
Remote user authentication is desirable for a Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) to verify the correctness of remote users. In 2013, Jiang et al. proposed privacy preserving authentication scheme for TMIS. Recently, Wu and Xu analyzed Jiang's scheme and identify serious security flaws in their scheme, namely, user impersonation attack, DoS attack and off-line password guessing attack. In this article, we analyze Wu and Xu's scheme and show that their scheme is also vulnerable to off-line password guessing attack and does not protect user anonymity. Moreover, we identify the inefficien…
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is appearing as a favorite technology for automated identification, which can be widely applied to many applications such as e-passport, supply chain management and ticketing. However, researchers have found many security and privacy problems along RFID technology. In recent years, many researchers are interested in RFID authentication protocols and their security flaws. In this paper, we analyze two of the newest RFID authentication protocols which proposed by Fu et al. and Li et al. from several security viewpoints. We present different attacks such as d…
Smart card based authentication schemes are used in various fields like e-banking, e-commerce, wireless sensor networks, medical system and so on to authenticate the both remote user and the application server during the communication via internet. Recently, Karuppiah and Saravanan proposed an authentication scheme which is based on password and one-way cryptographic hash function. They have used a secure identity mechanism i.e., users' and server's identity are not public. Thus, the user and the server do not send their identity directly to each other during communications. In this paper, we …
In this paper we present the first practical attack on the shifted conjugacy-based authentication protocol proposed by P. Dehornoy. We discuss the weaknesses of that primitive and propose ways to improve the protocol.
In 2005, Yang, Wang, and Chang proposed an improved timestamp-based password authentication scheme in an attempt to overcome the flaws of Yang-Shieh_s legendary timestamp-based remote authentication scheme using smart cards. After analyzing the improved scheme proposed by Yang-Wang-Chang, we have found that their scheme is still insecure and vulnerable to four types of forgery attacks. Hence, in this paper, we prove that, their claim that their scheme is intractable is incorrect. Also, we show that even an attack based on Sun et al._s attack could be launched against their scheme which they cl…
Telecare medical information systems are gaining rapid popularity in terms of providing the delivery of online health-related services such as online remote health profile access for patients and doctors. Due to being installed entirely on Internet, these systems are exposed to various security and privacy threats. Hence, establishing a secure key agreement and authentication process between the patients and the medical servers is an important challenge. Recently, Khatoon et.al proposed an ECC-based unlink-able authentication and key agreement method for healthcare related application in smart…
Recently, two certificateless three-party authenticated key agreement protocols were proposed, and both protocols were claimed they can meet the desirable security properties including forward security, key compromise impersonation resistance and so on. Through cryptanalysis, we show that one neither meets forward security and key compromise impersonation resistance nor resists an attack by an adversary who knows all users' secret values, and the other cannot resist key compromise impersonation attack. Finally, we propose improved protocols to make up two original protocols' security weaknesse…
Recently, Li et al. proposed a secure biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards to withstand the security flaws of Li-Hwang's efficient biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. Li et al.'s scheme is based on biometrics verification, smart card and one-way hash function, and it also uses the random nonce rather than a synchronized clock, and thus it is efficient in computational cost and more secure than Li-Hwang's scheme. Unfortunately, in this paper we show that Li et al.'s scheme still has some security weaknesses in their design. In orde…
Widespread attention is recently paid upon RFID system structure considering its ease of deployment over an extensive range of applications. Due to its several advantages, many technical articles are published to improve its capabilities over specific system implementations. Recently, a lightweight anti-de-synchronization RFID authentication protocol and a lightweight binding proof protocol to guard patient safety are proposed. This contribution provides enough evidence to prove the first introduced protocol vulnerability to de-synchronization attack. It also provides the other protocol's suff…
In this work we present the first passive attack over the SASI lightweight authentication protocol with modular rotations. This can be used to fully recover the secret $ID$ of the RFID tag, which is the value the protocol is designed to conceal. The attack is described initially for recovering $\lfloor log_2(96) \rfloor=6$ bits of the secret value $ID$, a result that by itself allows to mount traceability attacks on any given tag. However, the proposed scheme can be extended to obtain any amount of bits of the secret $ID$, provided a sufficiently large number of successful consecutive sessions…
In 2004, Das, Saxena and Gulati proposed a dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme which has many advantage such as no verifier table, user freedom to choose and change password and so on. However the subsequent papers have shown that this scheme is completely insecure and vulnerable to many attacks. Since then many schemes with improvements to Das et al's scheme has been proposed but each has its pros and cons. Recently Yan-yan Wang et al. have proposed a scheme to overcome security weaknesses of Das et al.'s scheme. However this scheme too is vulnerable to various security attacks…
The smart card based authentication protocols try to ensure secure and authorized communication between remote entities. In 2012, Wei et al. presented an improvement of Wu et al.'s two-factor authentication scheme for TMIS which is proven vulnerable to off-line password guessing attack by Zhu. Zhu also proposed a modified scheme to overcome with weakness of Wei et al.'s scheme, although Lee and Liu showed the failure of his scheme to resist parallel session attacks. Moreover, Lee and Liu introduced an improved scheme. We analyze Wei et al.'s, Zhu's and Lee and Liu's schemes and identify that n…
Continuous authentication has been proposed as a complementary security mechanism to password-based authentication for computer devices that are handled directly by humans, such as smart phones. Continuous authentication has some privacy issues as certain user features and actions are revealed to the authentication server, which is not assumed to be trusted. Wei et al. proposed in 2021 a privacy-preserving protocol for behavioral authentication that utilizes homomorphic encryption. The encryption prevents the server from obtaining sampled user features. In this paper, we show that the Wei et a…
With the rapid advancement of wireless network technology, usage of WSN in real time applications like military, forest monitoring etc. found increasing. Generally WSN operate in an unattended environment and handles critical data. Authenticating the user trying to access the sensor memory is one of the critical requirements. Many researchers have proposed remote user authentication schemes focusing on various parameters. In 2013, Li et al. proposed a temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs. Li et al. claimed that their scheme is secure against all maj…
Recently, Alomair et al. proposed the first UnConditionally Secure mutual authentication protocol for low-cost RFID systems(UCS-RFID). The security of the UCS-RFID relies on five dynamic secret keys which are updated at every protocol run using a fresh random number (nonce) secretly transmitted from a reader to tags. Our results show that, at the highest security level of the protocol (security parameter= 256), inferring a nonce is feasible with the probability of 0.99 by eavesdropping(observing) about 90 runs of the protocol. Finding a nonce enable a passive attacker to recover all five secre…
The Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) is developed to provide Telecare services to the remote user. A user can access remote medical servers using internet without moving from his place. Although remote user and server exchange their messages/data via public networks. An adversary is considered to be enough powerful that he may have full control over the public network. This makes these Telecare services vulnerable to attacks. To ensure secure communication between the user and server many password based authentication schemes have been proposed. In 2013, Hao et al. presented chaotic…
Recently, Yan et al. proposed a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with authentication using single photons and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs (Yan et al., CMC-Computers, Materials \& Continua, 63(3), 2020). In this work, we show that the QSDC protocol is not secure against intercept-and-resend attack and impersonation attack. An eavesdropper can get the full secret message by applying these attacks. We propose a modification of this protocol, which defeats the above attacks along with all the familiar attacks.
By expanding the connection of objects to the Internet and their entry to human life, the issue of security and privacy has become important. In order to enhance security and privacy on the Internet, many security protocols have been developed. Unfortunately, the security analyzes that have been carried out on these protocols show that they are vulnerable to one or few attacks, which eliminates the use of these protocols. Therefore, the need for a security protocol on the Internet of Things (IoT) has not yet been resolved. Recently, Khor and Sidorov cryptanalyzed the Wang et al. protocol and p…
We analyze the Sibert et al. group-based (Feige-Fiat-Shamir type) authentication protocol and show that the protocol is not computationally zero-knowledge. In addition, we provide experimental evidence that our approach is practical and can succeed even for groups with no efficiently computable length function such as braid groups. The novelty of this work is that we are not attacking the protocol by trying to solve an underlying complex algebraic problem, namely, the conjugacy search problem, but use a probabilistic approach, instead.
Advancement in communication technology provides a scalable platform for various services where a remote user can access the server from anywhere without moving from its place. It has provided a unique opportunity for online services, such that the user need not physically present at the service center. These services adopt authentication and key agreement protocols to ensure authorized and secure access to resources. Most of the authentication schemes support single server environment where the user has to register with each server. If a user wishes to access multiple application servers, he …
Federated identity management enables users to access multiple systems using a single login credential. However, to achieve this a complex privacy compromising authentication has to occur between the user, relying party (RP) (e.g., a business), and a credential service provider (CSP) that performs the authentication. In this work, we use a smart contract on a blockchain to enable an architecture where authentication no longer involves the CSP. Authentication is performed solely through user to RP communications (eliminating fees and enhancing privacy). No third party needs to be contacted, not…
Vajda and Buttyan (VB) proposed a set of five lightweight RFID authentication protocols. Defend, Fu, and Juels (DFJ) did cryptanalysis on two of them - XOR and SUBSET. To the XOR protocol, DFJ proposed repeated keys attack and nibble attack. In this paper, we identify the vulnerability existed in the original VB's successive session key permutation algorithm. We propose three enhancements to prevent DFJ's attacks and make XOR protocol stronger without introducing extra resource cost.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a powerful technology that, due to its numerous advantages, is supposed to replace the various identification systems such as barcodes or magnetic stripes in a short time. There are three devices involved in an RFID protocol: a Reader, a Tag, and a back-end Database. One of the key factors for the RFID technology is that, in order to be used on large scale, the price of the Tags has to be cheap: it cannot be expensive because who is supposed to use it would need a great amount of them, furthermore, Tags must have very small dimensions. The low-cost natu…
Cancelable biometric schemes generate secure biometric templates by combining user specific tokens and biometric data. The main objective is to create irreversible, unlinkable, and revocable templates, with high accuracy in matching. In this paper, we cryptanalyze two recent cancelable biometric schemes based on a particular locality sensitive hashing function, index-of-max (IoM): Gaussian Random Projection-IoM (GRP-IoM) and Uniformly Random Permutation-IoM (URP-IoM). As originally proposed, these schemes were claimed to be resistant against reversibility, authentication, and linkability attac…
Multi-Access or Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is being deployed by 4G/5G operators to provide computational services at lower latencies. Federating MECs across operators expands capability, capacity, and coverage but gives rise to two issues - third-party authentication and application mobility - for continuous service during roaming without re-authentication. In this work, we propose a Federated State transfer and 3rd-party Authentication (FS3A) mechanism that uses a transparent proxy to transfer the information of both authentication and application state across operators to resolve these issu…
This paper discusses a new protocol implementing authentication in a multi-located environment that avoids man-in-the-middle (MIM) attack, replay attack and provides privacy, integrity of a message for multi-located parties. The protocol uses the concept that each party is associated with a subsidiary agent.
Reflow is a novel signature scheme supporting unlinkable signatures by multiple parties authenticated by means of zero-knowledge credentials. Reflow integrates with blockchains and graph databases to ensure confidentiality and authenticity of signatures made by disposable identities that can be verified even when credential issuing authorities are offline. We implement and evaluate Reflow smart contracts for Zenroom and present an application to produce authenticated material passports for resource-event-agent accounting systems based on graph data structures. Reflow uses short and computation…
The session initiation protocol (SIP) is a powerful signaling protocol that controls communication on the Internet, establishing, maintaining, and terminating the sessions. The services that are enabled by SIP are equally applicable in the world of mobile and ubiquitous computing. In 2009, Tsai proposed an authenticated key agreement scheme as an enhancement to SIP. Very recently, Arshad et al. demonstrated that Tsai's scheme was vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and stolen-verifier attack. They also pointed that Tsai's scheme did not provide known-key secrecy and perfect forward …
The predominant grid authentication mechanisms use public key infrastructure (PKI). Nonetheless, certificate-less public key cryptography (CL-PKC) has several advantages that seem to well align with the demands of grid computing. Security and efficiency are the main objectives of grid authentication protocols. Unfortunately, certificate-less authenticated key agreement protocols rely on the bilinear pairing, that is extremely computational expensive. In this paper, we analyze the recently secure certificateless key agreement protocols without pairing. We then propose a novel grid pairing-free …
Cryptography protects users by providing functionality for the encryption of data and authentication of other users. This technology lets the receiver of an electronic message verify the sender, ensures that a message can be read only by the intended person, and assures the recipient that a message has not be altered in transit. Classical cryptanalysis involves an interesting combination of analytical reasoning, application of mathematical tools and pattern finding. The objectives of the proposed work are to propose a new cryptographic method based on the special matrix called the Hilbert matr…
With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password-cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give…
Biometrics security is a dynamic research area spurred by the need to protect personal traits from threats like theft, non-authorised distribution, reuse and so on. A widely investigated solution to such threats consists in processing the biometric signals under encryption, to avoid any leakage of information towards non-authorised parties. In this paper, we propose to leverage on the superior performance of multimodal biometric recognition to improve the efficiency of a biometric-based authentication protocol operating on encrypted data under the malicious security model. In the proposed prot…
Key Assignment Schemes (KASs) have been extensively studied in the context of cryptographically-enforced access control, where derived keys are used to decrypt protected resources. In this paper, we explore the use of KASs in entity authentication protocols, where we use derived keys to encrypt challenges. This novel use of KASs permits the efficient authentication of an entity in accordance with an authentication policy by associating entities with security labels representing specific services. Cryptographic keys are associated with each security label and demonstrating knowledge of an appro…
Implicit authentication consists of a server authenticating a user based on the user's usage profile, instead of/in addition to relying on something the user explicitly knows (passwords, private keys, etc.). While implicit authentication makes identity theft by third parties more difficult, it requires the server to learn and store the user's usage profile. Recently, the first privacy-preserving implicit authentication system was presented, in which the server does not learn the user's profile. It uses an ad hoc two-party computation protocol to compare the user's fresh sampled features agains…
Number theoretic public-key solutions, currently used in many applications worldwide, will be subject to various quantum attacks, making them less attractive for longer-term use. Certain group theoretic constructs are now showing promise in providing quantum-resistant cryptographic primitives, and may provide suitable alternatives for those looking to address known quantum attacks. In this paper, we introduce a new protocol called a Meta Key Agreement and Authentication Protocol (MKAAP) that has some characteristics of a public-key solution and some of a shared-key solution. Specifically it ha…
Smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Smartphones, in particular, have become more than personal assistants. These devices have provided new avenues for consumers to play, work, and socialize whenever and wherever they want. Smartphones are small in size, so they are easy to handle and to stow and carry in users' pockets or purses. However, mobile devices are also susceptible to various problems. One of the greatest concerns is the possibility of breach in security and privacy if the device is seized by an outside party. It is possible that threats can come from fr…
We propose a two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism called 2D-2FA to address security and usability issues in existing methods. 2D-2FA has three distinguishing features: First, after a user enters a username and password on a login terminal, a unique $\textit{identifier}$ is displayed to her. She $\textit{inputs}$ the same identifier on her registered 2FA device, which ensures appropriate engagement in the authentication process. Second, a one-time PIN is computed on the device and $\textit{automatically}$ transferred to the server. Thus, the PIN can have very high entropy, making guessing …
Anonymous Single-Sign-On authentication schemes have been proposed to allow users to access a service protected by a verifier without revealing their identity which has become more important due to the introduction of strong privacy regulations. In this paper we describe a new approach whereby anonymous authentication to different verifiers is achieved via authorisation tags and pseudonyms. The particular innovation of our scheme is authentication can only occur between a user and its designated verifier for a service, and the verification cannot be performed by any other verifier. The benefit…
Third-party dongles for cars, e.g. from insurance companies, can extract sensitive data and even send commands to the car via the standardized OBD-II interface. Due to the lack of message authentication mechanisms, this leads to major security vulnerabilities for example regarding the connection with malicious devices. Therefore, we apply a modular, protocol-independent firewall approach by placing a man-in-the-middle between the third-party dongle and the car's OBD-II interface. With this privileged network position, we demonstrate how the data flow accessible through the OBD-II interface can…
A secure optical communication requires both high transmission efficiency and high authentication performance, while existing cryptographic key distribution protocols based on ghost imaging have many shortcomings. Here, based on computational ghost imaging, we propose an interactive protocol that enables multi-party cryptographic key distribution over a public network and self-authentication by setting an intermediary that shares partial roles of the server. This fragment-synthesis-based authentication method may facilitate the remote distribution of cryptographic keys.
