An Improved Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Internet of Things has drastically expanded the global network for information exchange, because thousands of communication devices are becoming part of the global network. Besides the numerous benefits of global network expansion, secure communication and authentication among the comprising elements of the global network is also posing great challenges. Recently, Huang et al. proposed a key agreement scheme in order to facilitate user authenticity using elliptic curve cryptography. Huang et al. further emphasized the scheme is secure. Nevertheless, comprehensive analysis in this paper, demonstrates that Huang et al. scheme has correctness issues and is prone to impersonation/forgery attack. Then an improved scheme is presented to tenacity the said glitches existent in Huang et al.’s scheme. The security analysis of proposed scheme is substantiated in random oracle model. Furthermore, a simulation of proposed scheme is carried out by automated formal tool ProVerif. The performance and security assessments show that the scheme presented in this paper withstand impersonation attack and offers adequate security while reducing significant computation cost as compared with Huang et al.’s scheme. Hence, due to better performance and security, the proposed scheme is the appropriate one for security sensitive and resource constrained environments.