Password Protected Smart Card and Memory Stick Authentication Against Off-line Dictionary Attacks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes security protocols for password-based authentication with smart cards and memory sticks, focusing on preventing impersonation even if devices are stolen or passwords are weak, ensuring robust offline attack resistance.

Contribution

It introduces a new authentication framework that secures smart cards and portable devices against offline dictionary attacks and impersonation, even when devices are stolen or untrusted readers are used.

Findings

Proposes a protocol resistant to offline dictionary attacks.

Ensures smart card and device theft do not compromise security.

Extends security measures to portable storage devices.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the security requirements for remote authentication with password protected smart card. In recent years, several protocols for password-based authenticated key exchange have been proposed. These protocols are used for the protection of password based authentication between a client and a remote server. In this paper, we will focus on the password based authentication between a smart card owner and smart card via an untrusted card reader. In a typical scenario, a smart card owner inserts the smart card into an untrusted card reader and input the password via the card reader in order for the smart card to carry out the process of authentication with a remote server. In this case, we want to guarantee that the card reader will not be able to impersonate the card owner in future without the smart card itself. Furthermore, the smart card could be stolen. If this happens, we want the assurance that an adversary could not use the smart card to impersonate the card owner even though the sample space of passwords may be small enough to be enumerated by an off-line adversary. At the end of this paper, we further extend our results to credential storage on portable non-tamper resistant storage devices such as USB memory sticks.