A review on remote user authentication schemes using smart cards

Abstract

Remote user authentication is a mechanism in which the remote server verifies the legitimacy of a user over an insecure communication channel. Password based authentication schemes have been widely deployed to verify the legitimacy of remote users as password authentication is one of the simplest and the most convenient authentication mechanism over insecure networks. In remote user authentication scheme, the user is assigned a smart card, which is being personalized by some parameters and provide the legal users to use the resources of the remote system. Until now, there have been ample of remote user authentication schemes published in the literature and each published schemes have its own merits and demerits. Recently, many schemes proposed are based on the one-way hash function. The computational complexity of their schemes is superior to the discrete logarithm-problem-based schemes. In our paper, we have defined all the security requirements and the goals. An ideal password authentication schemes should satisfy and achieve all of these. We have presented the results of our survey through five of the currently available secure one way hash function based remote user authentication schemes. We hope an ideal smart card (not storing (IDi, PWi), which meets all the security requirements and achieves all the goals can be developed.