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An enhanced biometrics-based user authentication scheme for multi-server environments in critical systems

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Abstract

Computer networks have become so ubiquitous that the user can access various services by using network devices at anytime and anywhere. However, due to the open nature of the network, the security issue has become an important consideration in these network-based systems that cannot be ignored, especially in critical systems, such as life-critical system and financial system. User authentication scheme is the most used and effective mechanism for information security, and many user authentication schemes have been proposed by researchers. Recently, Shen et al. proposed a biometrics-based user authentication scheme for multi-server environments in critical systems. However, their scheme lacks the wrong password detection mechanism and is vulnerable to denial-of-service attack. Besides, they do not consider the user anonymity property, and may suffer from biometrics template lost attack because the biometrics template is directly stored in user’s smart card. In this paper, an enhanced biometrics-based user authentication scheme for multi-server environments in critical systems is presented by adopting the fuzzy extractor. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme not only removes the security weaknesses of previous schemes, but also keeps the computational efficiency.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61300220, 61308001, 61572013 and 61572188, the Research Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, BUAA under Grant no. SKLSDE–2014KF–02, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Projects under Grant Nos. 2014M550590 and 2015T80035. Besides, it is also supported by PAPD, CICAEET, Fujian Education and Scientific Research Program for Young and Middle-aged Teachers under Grant No. JA14369, and the National Training Program of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the Undergraduates of Local University with the No. 201410534003.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan, 411201, China

    Xiong Li, Kaihui Wang & Yonghua Hu

  2. School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Xiong Li & Jian Shen

  3. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Xiong Li

  4. Department of Mathematics, Ch. Charan Singh University, Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, 200005, India

    Saru Kumari

  5. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Xiamen Institute of Technology, Xiamen, 361021, China

    Fan Wu

Authors
  1. Xiong Li
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  2. Kaihui Wang
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  3. Jian Shen
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  4. Saru Kumari
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  5. Fan Wu
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  6. Yonghua Hu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jian Shen.

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Li, X., Wang, K., Shen, J. et al. An enhanced biometrics-based user authentication scheme for multi-server environments in critical systems. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 7, 427–443 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-015-0338-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-015-0338-z

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