An improved secure remote login protocol with three-factor authentication

Design of a protocol for secure remote login to server(s) is essential, because it not only protects secret information of the users but also allows secure access to the authorized users. In this paper, an improved three-factor authenticated remote login scheme over earlier two recent ones is presented, where password, smartcard and user-biometric, which are user-known, possessed and inherited respectively, are incorporated. The proposed scheme comprises of three entities namely user-group, registration-center and server-group, and all communications among them are carried out with well security protection and thus, the requirement of secure channels as used in other schemes is avoided. In addition, the scheme is designed using existing cryptographic techniques including public-key encryption that made the scheme secure, however no PKI and/or public-key certificate is considered. An in-depth security analysis of the proposed scheme as well as a comparison with two existing methods are done, which confirm high security protection and improved performance, respectively.