Smart card based remote user authentication schemes — Survey

Remote user authentication scheme has been widely adopted in today´s web-enabled world due to increasing online threats and insecure communication. Security and privacy are two most important factors in today´s real time applications. Thus many schemes have enhanced the traditional password based authentication scheme so that the number of online attacks can be reduced there by providing more secure environment. But these enhanced features are not sufficient for a remote user authentication scheme to be accurate and stronger than previous existing traditional schemes. Thus computational and communicational costs have to be considered to make the remote user authentication scheme more reliable and which can be able to prevent the system from many internet threats. In today´s client-server architecture, mutual authentication and communication privacy are considered as the essential requirements. Thus a survey on RUA scheme is being done in this paper by analyzing and classifying the existing schemes accordingly. These schemes fail to serve all the purposes of an ideal RUA scheme since the existing schemes have several security pitfalls and are vulnerable to many attacks. The scheme which inherits all the security advantages of the existing schemes is an ideal RUA scheme. An ideal RUA scheme should achieve and withstand all possible goals and attacks which are being discussed in this paper. Thus the contribution of the paper is to develop an ideal RUA scheme while keeping the merits of the well-known smart card based authentication schemes.