Two-factor mutual authentication based on smart cards and passwords

Authors

Guomin Yang, City University of Hong KongFollow
Duncan S. Wong, City University of Hong KongFollow
Huaxiong Wang, Nanyang Technological University, SingaporeFollow
Xiaotie Deng, City University of Hong KongFollow

RIS ID

89159

Publication Details

Yang, G., Wong, D. S., Wang, H. & Deng, X. (2008). Two-factor mutual authentication based on smart cards and passwords. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 74 1160-1172.

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 twofactor 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 smartcard-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.