Smart Card Based Remote User Authentication Schemes: A Survey

Abstract

In recent years, a new technology has come into picturefor remote user authentication (RUA) in which the remote server verifies the legitimacy and authenticity of a user over an insecure communication channel using biometrics. Because of their computational cost and convenient portability for thepurpose of authentication, remote user authentication scheme based on smart cards is widely adopted. Mutual authentication and communication privacy are considered as the essential requirements in today's client-server architecture. Therefore in this paper, a survey on RUA scheme is done by analyzing and classifying the existing schemes accordingly. The existing schemes have several security pitfalls and are vulnerable to many attacks. Thus they fail to serve all the purposes of an ideal RUA scheme. An ideal RUA scheme should inherit all the security advantages of the existing schemes. In this paper, all possible goals and attacks are defined that an ideal RUA scheme should achieve and withstand respectively. Thus the main contribution of the paper is to come up with an ideal RUA scheme while keeping the merits of the well-known smart card based authentication schemes.