Security enhancement of MD5 hashed passwords by using the unused bits of TCP header

Author

Chawdhury, Md Didarul Alam ; Habib, A. H M Ashfak

Author_Institution

Chittagong Univ. of Eng. & Technol., Chittagong

fYear

2008

fDate

24-27 Dec. 2008

Firstpage

714

Lastpage

717

Abstract

When a password is encrypted by a hash algorithm the resultant is called hashed password. In a server client based communication system such as Yahoo Messenger, AIM, passwords of clients are hashed by MD5 and passed to the server for authentication. This type of transmission is always a subject of interception by the hackers. These hashed passwords are passed through the Internet as a data packet. TCP header is a most common part of the data packet. In a TCP header there are six reserved bits which remains always unused. In this paper we propose a new approach to enhance the security of hashed passwords by using the six reserved bits of a TCP header. Here we encrypt the hashed password by a random key using simple mathematical function. The information needed to decrypt the encrypted hashed password is carried by the six bits of TCP header.

Keywords

Internet; client-server systems; cryptography; message authentication; transport protocols; Internet; MD5 hash algorithm; TCP header; hashed password encryption; mathematical function; message digest 5; random key; security enhancement; server client-based communication system; unused bit; user authentication; Authentication; Computer hacking; Computer security; Cryptography; Data security; Dictionaries; Information security; Internet; Network servers; Web server; Client-server systems; Computer network security; Cryptography; Data security; Security;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer and Information Technology, 2008. ICCIT 2008. 11th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Khulna

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2135-0

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-2136-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCITECHN.2008.4803081

Filename

4803081