Robust biometrics-based multi-server authentication with key agreement scheme for smart cards on elliptic curve cryptosystem

Conventional single-server authentication schemes suffer a significant shortcoming. If a remote user wishes to use numerous network services, he/she must register his/her identity and password at these servers. It is extremely tedious for users to register numerous servers. In order to resolve this problem, various multi-server authentication schemes recently have been proposed. However, these schemes are insecure against some cryptographic attacks or inefficiently designed because of high computation costs. Moreover, these schemes do not provide strong key agreement function which can provide perfect forward secrecy. Based on these motivations, this paper proposes a new efficient and secure biometrics-based multi-server authentication with key agreement scheme for smart cards on elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) without verification table to minimize the complexity of hash operation among all users and fit multi-server communication environments. By adopting the biometrics technique, the proposed scheme can provide more strong user authentication function. By adopting the ECC technique, the proposed scheme can provide strong key agreement function with the property of perfect forward secrecy to reduce the computation loads for smart cards. As a result, compared with related multi-serve authentication schemes, the proposed scheme has strong security and enhanced computational efficiency. Thus, the proposed scheme is extremely suitable for use in distributed multi-server network environments such as the Internet and in limited computations and communication resource environments to access remote information systems since it provides security, reliability, and efficiency.