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Abstract: Password-based authentication is widely used for systems that control remote access to computer networks. In order to address some of the security and management problems that occur in traditional password authentication protocols, research in recent decades has focused on smart card based password authentication. In this paper, we show that the improved smart card authentication scheme proposed by Xu-Zhu-Feng is vulnerable to internal and impersonation attacks. We propose an improvement of their solution, present a new efficient strong smart card authentication protocol, and demonstrate that the new protocol satisfies the requirements of strong smart card authentication and is more efficient. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recently, there are several articles proposed for the so-called SAS password authentication scheme with lower storage, processing, and transmission overheads. For benefiting from these advantages, there are a series of researches on the SAS-like schemes. However, as knowledge of cryptanalysis has involved, a series of modification have been made. Unfortunately, those enhancements have still security flaws. In this paper, a security issue is found in the latest modification and removed to form a new one. The proposed schemes not only keep the original advantages but also highlight a feature, mutual authentication between a user and a remote server, found in many authentication protocols but not found in the SAS-like schemes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]