A Robust and Efficient Password Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

Password authentication scheme using smart cards is an important part of securely accessing the server program. In 2012, Chen et al. proposed a robust smart-card-based remote user password authentication scheme. Recently, Li et al. discovered the scheme of Chen et al. cannot really ensure forward secrecy, and it cannot achieve the goal of efficiency for wrong password login. Then, they proposed an enhanced remote user password authentication scheme based on smart cards. In this paper, we propose a novel authentication scheme by using elliptic curve cryptography. The new scheme can achieve both the user anonymity and the goal of efficiency of incorrect password detection, and can also establish a session key for the subsequent secure communication. Moreover, we show by a detailed analysis that it requires lower computation cost while improving the security of the scheme.