Remote group user authentication with forward secrecy and key agreement with smartcard

Abstract

Smartcards have been widely used in the recent decade for user authentication. Smartcards are mainly used with asymmetric cryptographic schemes until recently Hwang and Li proposed a symmetric approach for authentication. Without the digital certificate and verification table, the scheme saves a considerable operational overhead. Later, Lee et al. proposed an improved nonce-based scheme that further reduces the amount of overhead and does not depend on a synchronized clock. However, their scheme is not secure under the parallel session attack. In this paper, we enhance the scheme to avoid such attack without increasing the amount of computation. Furthermore, we propose two other alternatives on two-party and group authentication which provide additional security properties, forward secrecy and session key agreement, to increase the level of security.