Unified and integrated authentication and key agreement scheme for e-governance system without verification table

Abstract

E-governance or electronic governance is an application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for delivering cost-effective government services by any country to its citizens with reliability, transparency and efficiency. Majority of authentication schemes for e-governance in India are based on single-server environment. To access the services, users need to register themselves at the authentication server for every e-governance service. Various e-governance services work through different servers, and therefore users get registered on each server separately. These services and servers require a unified and integrated authentication scheme to overcome the problem of multiple registrations and login processes. This paper proposes a dynamic authentication protocol based on the identity of a user for multi-server architecture without using verification tables. It is also capable of integrating all the existing e-governance projects. The proposed protocol fulfills the security requirements such as mutual authentication, traceability and identity protection along with the facility to share a session key among all the servers for secure communication.