A new approach for anonymous password authentication

• Main Authors: YANG, Yanjiang, ZHOU, Jianying, Weng, Jian, BAO, Feng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2009
• Subjects: Anonymous password authentication; Guessing attack; Unlinkability; Scalability; Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4202; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5205/viewcontent/A_New_Approach_for_Anonymous_Password_Authenticati.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Anonymous password authentication reinforces password authentication with the protection of user privacy. Considering the increasing concern of individual privacy nowadays, anonymous password authentication represents a promising privacy-preserving authentication primitive. However, anonymous password authentication in the standard setting has several inherent weaknesses, making its practicality questionable. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient approach for anonymous password authentication. Our approach assumes a different setting where users do not register their passwords to the server; rather, they use passwords to protect their authentication credentials. We present a concrete scheme, and get over a number of challenges in securing password-protected credentials against off-line guessing attacks. Our experimental results confirm that conventional anonymous password authentication does not scale well, while our new scheme demonstrates very good performance.