Offline Dictionary Attack on Password Authentication Schemes Using Smart Cards

Abstract

Abstract. The design of secure and efficient smart-card-based password authentication schemes remains a challenging problem today despite two decades of intensive research in the security community, and the current crux lies in how to achieve truly two-factor security even if the smart cards can be tampered. In this paper, we analyze two recent proposals, namely, Hsieh-Leu's scheme and Wang's PSCAV scheme. We show that, under their non-tamper-resistance assumption of the smart cards, both schemes are still prone to offline dictionary attack, in which an attacker can obtain the victim's password when getting temporary access to the victim's smart card. This indicates that compromising a single factor (i.e., the smart card) of these two schemes leads to the downfall of both factors (i.e., both the smart card and the password), thereby invalidating their claim of preserving two-factor security. Remarkably, our attack on the latter protocol, which is not captured in Wang's original protocol security model, reveals a new attacking scenario and gives rise to the strongest adversary model so far. In addition, we make the first attempt to explain why smart cards, instead of common cheap storage devices (e.g., USB sticks), are preferred in most two-factor authentication schemes for security-critical applications.

A Robust Authentication Scheme for Client-Server Architecture With Provable Security Analysis

“…Wang, Ma, P. Wang, & Chen, 2012;D. Wang, Ma, & P. Wang, 2012b;D. Wang & P. Wang, 2013;Y, Wang, 2012)also presented the confidence of two authentication protocols of Leu and Hsieh (Hsieh & Leu, 2012) and found that their scheme is defenseless to the offline dictionary.…”

“…Wang, Ma, P. Wang, & Chen, 2012;D. Wang, Ma, & P. Wang, 2012b;D. Wang & P. Wang, 2013;Y, Wang, 2012) present a remarkable learning to examine the trust among smart cards and terminal; that is, whenever an attacker gets a lost smart card, the chance of user's information is being compromised at any stage and at level.…”

“…Wang, Ma, P. Wang, & Chen, 2012;D. Wang, Ma, & P. Wang, 2012b;D. Wang & P. Wang, 2013;Y, Wang, 2012): (a) a private key based schemes are secure against the type I and II attackers, but not against a type III attacker; (b) a public key schemes are secure against type I, II and III attackers; (c) a public key HMQV-based schemes are secure against type I and II attackers, but not against the type III attacker; and (d) a public key based PSCAV-based schemes are secure against type I, II and III attackers.…”

“…Wang, Ma, P. Wang, & Chen, 2012;D. Wang, Ma, & P. Wang, 2012b;D. Wang & P. Wang, 2013;Y, Wang, 2012) found that PSCAb has many practical drawbacks, and PSCAV is defenseless in the type III attacker.…”

“…They also presented the characteristics of offline request submitter's password change facility and strong resistance to stolen or loss smart card attack which are hard to realize simultaneously. Later, in (D. Wang & P. Wang, 2013) they investigated all the weaknesses among system efficiency and user anonymity and scrutinized a significant result: a public key infrastructure (PKI) technique is essentially crucial for a two-factor authentication scheme with user anonymity. But they used cryptographic method for their schemes.…”