An authentication scheme based on novel construction of hash chains for smart mobile devices

Abstract

With the increasing number of smart mobile devices, applications based on mobile network take an indispensable role in the Internet of Things. Due to the limited computing power and restricted storage capacity of mobile devices, it is very necessary to design a secure and lightweight authentication scheme for mobile devices. As a lightweight cryptographic primitive, the hash chain is widely used in various cryptographic protocols and one-time password systems. However, most of the existing research work focuses on solving its inherent limitations and deficiencies, while ignoring its security issues. We propose a novel construction of hash chain that consists of multiple different hash functions of different output lengths and employ it in a time-based one-time password (TOTP) system for mobile device authentication. The security foundation of our construction is that the order of the hash functions is confidential and the security analysis demonstrates that it is more secure than other constructions. Moreover, we discuss the degeneration of our construction and implement the scheme in a mobile device. The simulation experiments show that the attacker cannot increase the probability of guessing the order by eavesdropping on the invalid passwords.