A Secure Authentication Scheme for Teleservices Using Multi-Server Architecture

Abstract

The telecommunications industry covers various sectors and services such as broadband, telecom equipment, telecom infrastructure, telephone service providers, mobile virtual network operators, 5G, and the white space spectrum. Smart Cards may be chosen as one of the best mechanisms for authorized access to these services in the telecom sector. Recently, Jin Kwak proposed a scheme based on dynamic identity for authentication purposes, mentioning that the scheme does not suffer from security breaches and attacks. This paper illustrates Jin Kwak’s technique and finds that it violates the purpose contrary to his claim. Due to a design issue in his scheme, an adversary may guess the password in a polynomial time and impersonate a legal user. Furthermore, other attacks, including replay attack, are also possible, as the time stamp was not protected in this scheme. We propose an improved version of this scheme, and it is free from various attacks, including password guessing by hiding the identity of the user and replay attacks by using the time stamp securely. The results mentioned in performance and efficiency comparison show a faster scheme than many existing schemes.