SMFA: Strengthening Multi-Factor Authentication With Steganography for Enhanced Security

Traditional password-based authentication mechanisms exhibit significant security vulnerabilities, prompting the adoption of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to enhance user verification. However, current MFA methods, such as OffPAD, One-Time Password Tokens (OTT), and smartcard-based systems, remain vulnerable to attacks like Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), session hijacking, replay, phishing, and denial of service (DoS). Additionally, the conventional single-server authentication approach is inefficient and inadequate for modern security needs. This study introduces Secure Multi-Factor Authentication (SMFA), a novel framework designed to address these challenges by leveraging steganography for secure credential transmission, reducing susceptibility to MITM and session hijacking attacks. SMFA also incorporates an additional Universal Serial Bus (USB) device as a supplementary authentication factor and employs a multi-server architecture to overcome the limitations of single-server models. A comprehensive analysis comparing SMFA to existing MFA protocols reveals its superior ability to counter MITM, replay, DoS, user impersonation, and password-guessing attacks. The results demonstrate that SMFA offers a robust and effective solution, addressing the weaknesses of both traditional password-based systems and current MFA methods.