Survey of Remote User Password Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

Password authentication has been adopted as one of the most commonly used solution in the network environment to protect resources from unauthorized access. Password authentication based on smart cards is one of the simplest and the most convenient authentication scheme and is mostly used to authenticate the legitimacy of remote users. Many schemes based on cryptography have been proposed by various researchers to solve the problem. However, previous schemes are vulnerable to various attacks and are neither efficient, nor user friendly. Today, there are many potential attacks that are targeted at authentication including masquerade attack, insider attack, parallel session attack, offline password guessing attack, server spoofing attack, and many more. In this paper, we have studied a number of schemes proposed by many researchers, their applications, merits and demerits and found that none of the schemes meet all the security requirements and goals, which are necessary for secure password authentication scheme. Here, we have defined and suggested all the security requirements and the goals an ideal password authentication scheme must satisfy and achieve.