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The emerging cloud infrastructure has escalated number of servers offering flexible and diverse remote services through public channels. However, user authentication in conventional single-server architecture necessitates multiple smart cards maintenance and passwords memorization to access different cloud servers. To address this limitation, researchers devised authentication protocols for multi-server architecture that offers scalable platform wherein users can access multiple servers with single registration. The multi-factor authentication protocols leverage biometric keys to bind users' physical characteristics with their identity, offering higher security than two-factor authentication protocols. However, the existing protocols for multi-server architecture are prone to replay, user impersonation, denial of service, server spoofing attacks and lack security functionalities such as user anonymity and untraceability, backward and forward secrecy, and session key security. Moreover, the incorporation of registration center (RC) to authenticate each pair of user-server in multi-server architecture can lead to computational bottleneck and single-point failure issues on RC. To overcome these security loopholes, we design a novel provably secure multi-factor elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) based authentication protocol for multi-server architecture with offline RC for cloud environment. The formal security analysis under widely accepted real-or-random (ROR) model and informal security analysis of proposed protocol demonstrate provision of security functionalities and resilience against potential security attacks. Furthermore, we adopt Scyther security verification tool to verify our protocol's correctness and security properties. The performance evaluation demonstrates that our protocol offers robust security functionalities with reasonable communication and computation overheads than state-of-the-art protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations often use smart card-based user authentication for remote access. The research community has put forward dynamic identity based remote user authentication schemes for distributed multi-server environment to safeguard the connection between user and server. Recently, Qiu et al. proposed an efficient smart card based remote user authentication scheme for the multi-server environment, in which they uphold their scheme provides mutual authentication and key agreement, user-anonymity, resistance against various kind of attacks. This paper will manifest that if the adversary is successful in stealing a smart card, then their schemes are vulnerable to masquerade attack, server spoofing attack, and password guessing attack. We overcome their flaws and propose an enhanced anonymous scheme where whenever the user wants to log into a server, the user identity is changed dynamically before login. And also, the scheme resists all possible attacks. We compared our scheme with respect to the related scheme, used BAN logic for verification of correctness of mutual key agreement and AVISPA to prove scheme is safe. We have provided formal security proofs for our scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks described as an emerging new technology with a very promising future. Advances made in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the merging of advanced electronic and wireless technologies. Due to the popularity gained by the wireless environment, Security is the main concern. Node authentication without compromising lifespan of the networks is practically a daunting task. This research work introduces a new model, IBE-ECC that administers the energy of sensor nodes with faster authentication process. Signature verification model is deployed to achieve faster authentication process. Nevertheless, the public key-based strategies eliminate the security process but their verification process takes larger time. Therefore, authentication speed is a major constraint of our research endeavor. The proposed scheme is design to achieve high security and fast authentication with energy efficiency. It uses identity-based encryption on elliptic curve cryptography and a user authentication with an energy efficient key management. Further, to improve the speed of the authentication, it reduces the signature size so that it would accelerate signature verification faster. Hence, the proposed scheme will provide a secure key management, energy efficiency, fast authentication and additionally, computation overhead and communication costs are minimized. Finally, the experimental result demonstrates that the proposed strategy obtains 4797 ms higher execution efficiency and 45. 53% lower computation costs than existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the debate on user privacy is becoming increasingly fierce. As wireless sensor networks (e.g.: electronic medical system and smart home systems) increasingly penetrate people's lives, it is imperative to design an identity authentication scheme with user privacy protection for wireless sensor networks. At present, many researchers have given their user authentication schemes by using different methods for user privacy protection. Two factor authentication scheme is now considered a relatively high safety performance. In this paper, we analyze the two factor authentication scheme proposed by Nam et al., and find that the scheme still has defects. The most fatal problem is that the scheme does not provide sufficient protection for privacy in wireless sensor networks. Based on the work of Nam, we are a complement to the defects of the existing scheme. A random number is inserted into the user registration phase to change the identity of the user into a disguised identity and assign ECC key pairs to each sensor node, thus enhancing the security of the node authentication data. In formal analysis, we use BAN logic as our analysis tool to prove that our scheme achieves mutual authentication. Furthermore, we also give informal analysis for almost known attacks, the result shows that our proposed scheme could provide better security features. Finally, we implemented our authentication scheme on the RF chip CC2538, and measured the related execution time parameters. In order to obtain more security features, the proposed scheme is slightly higher than other schemes in terms of time complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement of IT, users can now share and use a vast amount of information, but at the same time, their personal information has been widely used and made public. The personal information used should be protected in a secure manner, and users should also go through the correct authentication process. For this, user biometric information is being used as an authentication method. Currently, there are various methods of authenticating using biometric information of a user. However, to build a secure authentication system, it is necessary to use a method with high entropy, which is easy to use and a measure of unpredictability. In a biometric authentication protocol currently used in many systems, biometric information required for authentication is stored and used in a certificate authority or a web server. This can result in the occurrence of information leakage. The paper utilizes data that can be used for passwords extracted using the Moiré technique to apply it to extracting user biometric information to propose a safer and convenient method of authentication. Also, it proposes an authentication protocol that can authenticate a user through a combination of user personal information and data extracted through Moiré technique using multi-factor authentication technology, without storing the data on the server of a certification authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]