A Study on Efficient and Secure user Authentication System based on Smart-card

摘要

User authentication service is an absolutely necessary condition while securely implementing an IT service system. It allows for valid users to securely log-in the system and even to access valid resources from database. For efficiently and securely authenticating users, smart-card has been used as a popular tool because of its convenience and popularity. Furthermore the smart-card can maintain its own power for computation and storage, which makes it easier to be used in all types of authenticating environment that usually needs temporary storage and additional computation for authenticating users and server. First, in 1981, Lamport has designed an authentication service protocol based on user's smart-card. However it has been criticized in aspects of efficiency and security because it uses hash chains and the revealment of server's secret values are not considered. Over the years, many smart-card based authentication service protocol have been designed. Very recently, Xu, Zhu, Feng have suggested a provable and secure smart-card based authentication protocol. In this paper, first, we define all types of attacks in the smart-card based authentication service. According to the defined attacks, however, the protocol by Xu, Zhu, Feng is weak against an attack that an attacker with secret values of server is able to impersonate a valid user without knowing password and secret values of user. An efficient and secure countermeasure is suggested, then the security is analyzed.