An efficient entity authentication protocol with enhanced security and privacy properties

Abstract

User authentication based on biometrics is getting an increasing attention. However, privacy concerns for biometric data have impeded the adoption of cloud-based services for biometric authentication. This paper proposes an efficient distributed two-factor authentication protocol that is privacy-preserving even in the presence of colluding internal adversaries. One of the authentication factors in our protocol is biometrics, and the other factor can be either knowledge-based or possession-based. The actors involved in our protocol are users, user/client devices with biometric sensors, service provider, and cloud for storing protected biometric templates. Contrary to the existing biometric authentication protocols that offer security only in the honest-but-curious adversarial model, our protocol provides enhanced security and privacy properties in the active (or malicious) adversarial model. Specifically, our protocol offers identity privacy, unlinkability, and user data (i.e., the biometric template data and the second factor) privacy against compromised cloud storage service, and preserves the privacy of the user data even if the cloud storage service colludes with the service provider. Moreover, our protocol only employs lightweight schemes and thus is efficient. The distributed model combined with the security and privacy properties of our protocol paves the way towards a new cloud-based business model for privacy-preserving authentication.