A robust anonymous biometric-based authenticated key agreement scheme for multi-server environments

PLoS One. 2017 Nov 9;12(11):e0187403. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187403. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

In order to improve the security in remote authentication systems, numerous biometric-based authentication schemes using smart cards have been proposed. Recently, Moon et al. presented an authentication scheme to remedy the flaws of Lu et al.'s scheme, and claimed that their improved protocol supports the required security properties. Unfortunately, we found that Moon et al.'s scheme still has weaknesses. In this paper, we show that Moon et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to insider attack, server spoofing attack, user impersonation attack and guessing attack. Furthermore, we propose a robust anonymous multi-server authentication scheme using public key encryption to remove the aforementioned problems. From the subsequent formal and informal security analysis, we demonstrate that our proposed scheme provides strong mutual authentication and satisfies the desirable security requirements. The functional and performance analysis shows that the improved scheme has the best secure functionality and is computational efficient.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Biometric Identification / methods*
  • Computer Security
  • Computers*
  • Logic

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61300172, 61572027, 61402037), http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.