In a multi‐server environment, remote user authentication is essential for secure communication. Recently, Liao and Wang, Hsiang and Shih, and Lee et al. have successively proposed various remote user authentication schemes for multi‐server environments. However, each of these schemes exhibits distinct security weaknesses. The Liao–Wang scheme is vulnerable to insider attacks and masquerade attacks, and fails to provide two‐factor security and mutual authentication. The Hsiang–Shih scheme is vulnerable to masquerade attacks and cannot provide mutual authentication. This paper shows that the Lee et al. scheme does not provide two‐factor security and cannot withstand masquerade attacks. Their scheme demonstrates poor reparability and fails to provide mutual authentication. Its password change process is inconvenient and inefficient for users who wish to update passwords. Therefore, we propose a novel two‐factor authentication scheme with anonymity for multi‐server environments and use the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic method to verify our scheme. We compare the performance and functionality of the proposed scheme with those of previous schemes. Cryptanalysis demonstrated that our improved scheme not only overcomes the drawbacks of the Lee et al., Hsiang–Shih, and Liao–Wang schemes but also satisfies crucial design criteria for secure remote user authentication schemes in multi‐server environments. This paper presents a real‐case scenario and provides practical examples. We show that our improved authentication scheme provides more functionality than the mentioned schemes do, and can enhance effectiveness in protecting multi‐server environments. We also show that the proposed scheme is efficient and can enhance the efficiency of the authentication scheme in a multi‐server environment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study proposes a three-factor control protocol for universal serial bus (USB) on an elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC). USB is a universal interface used in an enormous number of devices. It has become the most popular interface standard for computer connections. However, since USB provides high transmission speed and is very convenient to carry, many workplace and commercial establishments have prohibited their employees from using USB devices. This precaution is an important way to prevent confidential data leaks via USB devices, as USB connections lack security management. Therefore the authors use a three-factor control protocol to ensure the security of USB connections. The proposed authentication protocol combines biometric, password and smart card to provide high security on the USB mutual authentication. To provide secure and efficient transmission between the user and the USB server, the proposed protocol adopts ECC to encrypt data. Compared to other encryption methods, the proposed protocol uses much smaller key sizes. As a further benefit, this protocol reduces the smart card computational cost and provides an efficient transmission for USB devices. This new scheme improves the security, efficiency and usability of the authentication process. More studies on USB are needed.

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In the Internet of Things (IoT), numerous devices can interact with each other over the Internet. A wide range of IoT applications have already been deployed, such as transportation systems, healthcare systems, smart buildings, smart factories, and smart cities. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play crucial roles in these IoT applications. Researchers have published effective (but not entirely secure) approaches for merging WSNs into IoT environments. In IoT environments, the security effectiveness of remote user authentication is crucial for information transmission. Computational efficiency and energy consumption are crucial because the energy available to any WSN is limited. This paper proposes a notably efficient and secure authentication scheme based on temporal credential and dynamic ID for WSNs in IoT environments. The Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic method was used to validate our scheme. Cryptanalysis revealed that our scheme can overcome the security weaknesses of previously published schemes. The security functionalities and performance efficiency of our scheme are compared with those of previous related schemes. The result demonstrates that our scheme's security functionalities are quantitatively and qualitatively superior to those of comparable schemes. Our scheme can improve the effectiveness of authentication in IoT environments. Notably, our scheme has superior performance efficiency, low computational cost, frugal energy consumption, and low communication cost.

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