Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/190
On the Security of an Improved Password Authentication Scheme Based on ECC
Ding Wang and Chun-guang Ma
Abstract: The design of secure remote user authentication schemes for mobile applications is still an open and quite challenging problem, though many schemes have been published lately. Recently, Islam and Biswas pointed out that Lin and Hwang et al.'s password-based authentication scheme is vulnerable to various attacks, and then presented an improved scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to overcome the drawbacks. Based on heuristic security analysis, Islam and Biswas claimed that their scheme is secure and can withstand all related attacks. In this paper, however, we show that Islam and Biswas's scheme cannot achieve the claimed security goals and report its flaws: (1) It is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack, stolen verifier attack and denial of service (DoS) attack; (2) It fails to preserve user anonymity. The cryptanalysis demonstrates that the scheme under study is unfit for practical use.
Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Authentication protocol; Smart card; Cryptanalysis; User anonymity; Elliptic curve cryptography
Publication Info: The work submitted in the manuscript is original and has not been published elsewhere.
Date: received 6 Apr 2012, last revised 10 Aug 2012
Contact author: wangdingg at mail nankai edu cn
Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation
Version: 20120810:071245 (All versions of this report)
Short URL: ia.cr/2012/190
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