Design and Analysis of a Provably Secure Multi-server Authentication Scheme

Abstract

Authenticated key agreement protocols play an important role to ensure authorized and secure communication over public network. In recent years, several authentication protocols have been proposed for single-server environment. Most of these protocols present efficient and secure solution for single-server environment. However, adoption of these protocols for multi-server environment is not feasible as user have to register on each server, separately. On the contrary, multi-server authentication schemes require single registration. The one time registration mechanism makes the system user-friendly and supports inter-operability. Unfortunately, most of the existing multi-server authentication schemes require all servers to be trusted, involvement of central authority in mutual authentication or multiple secret keys. In general, a servers may be semi-trusted, thus considering all server to be trusted does not seems to be realistic scenario. Involvement of central authority in mutual authentication may create bottleneck scenario for large network. Also, computation of multiple secret keys may not be suitable for smart card based environment as smart card keeps limited storage space. To overcome these drawbacks, we aim to design an authentication scheme for multi-server environment, where all servers does not need to be trusted, central authority does not require in mutual authentication and smart card need not to store multiple secret keys. In this paper, we first analyze the security of recently proposed Yeh's smart card based multi-server authentication scheme (Yeh in Wirel Pers Commun 79(3):1621---1634, 2014). We show that Yeh's scheme does not resist off-line password guessing attack, insider attack and user impersonation attack. Furthermore, we propose an efficient multi-server authentication scheme which does not require all servers to be trusted, central authority no longer needed in authentication and smart card need not to store multiple secret keys. We prove the correctness of mutual authentication of our scheme using the widely-accepted BAN logic. Through the security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Yeh's scheme. In addition, the proposed scheme is comparable in terms of the communication and computational overheads with related schemes.