Cryptanalysis and Improvement of a Group Authentication Scheme with Multiple Trials and Multiple Authentications

• Main Authors: Zhe Xia, Yining Liu, Ching-Fang Hsu, Chin-Chen Chang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi-Wiley 2020-01-01
• Series: Security and Communication Networks
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2020/6183861

Authentication is one of the most fundamental services in cryptography and information security. Compared with the traditional authentication methods, group authentication allows a group of users to be authenticated at once rather than authenticating each of these users individually. Therefore, it is more desirable in the group oriented environment, such as multicast/conference communications. In this paper, we first demonstrate that a recent group authentication scheme by Chien (Security and Communication Networks, 2017) suffers some security flaws, i.e. an adversary in the asynchronous communication model can pretend to be a legitimate group member without being detected. We then use the Anonymous Veto Networks (AV-net) to patch Chien’s scheme, so that its security can be rigorously proved in a well-defined security model.