A bilateral remote user authentication scheme that preserves user anonymity

Abstract

Smart card-based authentication is one of the most widely used and practical solutions to remote user authentication. Compared to other authentication schemes, our proposed scheme aims to provide more functionalities and to resist well-known attacks. These crucial merits include (1) a user can freely choose and change his passwords; (2) our scheme provides mutual authentication between a server and a user; (3) it achieves user anonymity; (4) a server and a user can generate authenticated sessions keys. Moreover, our scheme can resist replay attacks, forgery attacks, insider attacks, reflection attacks, and parallel session attacks. Copyright (c) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.