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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]

Abstract: This paper considers the issue on authenticated group key agreement protocol among n users broadcasting communication over an insecure public network. Many authenticated group Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocols have been proposed to meet the challenges. However, existing protocols are either limited by the use of public key infrastructure or by their scalability, requiring O(n) rounds. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose an efficient password-based group key agreement protocol resistant to the dictionary attacks by adding password-authentication services to a non-authenticated multi-party key agreement protocol proposed by Horng. The proposed protocol is very efficient since it only requires constant rounds to agree upon a session key, and each user broadcasts a constant number of messages and only requires four exponentiations. Under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption, we will show the proposed protocol is provably secure in both the ideal-cipher model and the random-oracle model. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper we point out potential weaknesses of AuthA protocols which are in the process of being standardized by IEEE; IEEE P1363-Password-based authentication and key agreement protocols. More precisely, we present chosen protocol attacks on AuthA password-authenticated key agreement protocols. We make suggestions for improvement. [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]