Cryptanalysis and Improvement of a Secure Mutual Authentication Scheme for Remote Users

Unauthorized access of resources is prohibited by user authentication schemes over insecure networks. In recent researches, smart cards have been proved to be the basic tools to provide user authentication. It has been shown in this paper, that the newly proposed scheme by Marimuthu Karuppiah et al. is still susceptible to privileged insider, offline password guessing, man-in-the-middle, stolen smart card, known session-specific temporary information, local password verification and forgery attacks in addition, mutual authentication and user anonymity is also not being supported by them. A secure authentication scheme has been presented here, in order to fix the loop holes of the previous schemes. The proposed scheme has been proved to be safe, from diverse attacks, together with the attacks that have been observed in the previous scheme's security analysis. Performance comparison on the basis of computation cost and security requirement comparison have also been done. Resultantly the proposed scheme is giving more secured and better results in case of security as well as in case of performance.