A Fingerprint-Based User Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards in IPTV Environments

In IPTV environments, a user authentication is an important security primitive to check the validity of membership. Authentication schemes between a smart card and set-top-box (STB) for authenticating users have been proposed in IPTV environment. Since many contents contain classifiable elements such as violence, sex, coarse language, themes and drug use, we should classify contents with ages and restrict an access ability of a user according to user's age. Specially, to protect young children from a misusage of harmfulness contents, the legal and technical efforts are also required in IPTV. In aspect to technical efforts, it is required to provide an access control according to the policy of content provider. In this paper we first propose a fingerprint-based user authentication scheme which checks the suitability of user to the policy of contents provider. Since our scheme additionally contains a pre-computation phase, the computation cost of the smart cards is very low. And, the proposed scheme can also solve vulnerabilities against security problems such as smart card cloning and McCormac Hack attack in IPTV environment.