A secure mutual authentication scheme with key agreement using smart card from bilinear pairings

Abstract

Remote authentication is an important mechanism to control user access to remote systems in a way such that only legitimate users can be authenticated before being granted services. There are several methods to implement authentication but for humans, password authentication is preferred. Advances in elliptic curve cryptography with bilinear pairings attract many researchers to design various secure and efficient authentication schemes. However, uncareful designs may cause vulnerabilities to network attacks in authentication schemes such as jeon et al's in the 2nd International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Network (MSN 2006) and Jia et at's in the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA'06). We show that these schemes are broken under our impersonation attacks in which any adversary can be authenticate(] successfully with probability I at no extra cost. We also suggest our provably secure authentication scheme featuring key exchange capability, which is verified to be more efficient from the point of computational complexity than the previous schemes.