A security enhanced password authentication and update scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

As two fundamental requirements to ensure secure communications over an insecure public network channel, password authentication and update of password have received considerable attention. To satisfy the above two requirements, Islam and Biswas 2013 proposed a password authentication and update scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography. They claimed that their scheme could withstand various attacks. Unfortunately, He et al. 2012 found Islam and Biswas' scheme is still vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and stolen-verifier attack. In this paper, a security enhanced scheme is developed to eliminate the identified weaknesses. The analysis shows that our scheme not only overcomes the security vulnerability in Islam et al.'s scheme, but also has better performance than their scheme. Then our scheme is more suitable for practical applications.