An anonymous and efficient multiserver authenticated key agreement with offline registration centre

Abstract

Multiserver authentication (MSA) architecture permits its registered users to get the services of various service providers without performing separate registrations with each server. Since, a single registration from registration authority, a trusted third party, is sufficient to get mutually authenticated with service providers, onwards. In this paper, we have emphasized only on the MSA-based schemes that do not require online registration authority for mutual authentication. While, considering those MSA schemes, to date, there is no secure and efficient MSA protocol in our observation that is free of all four limitations at the same time, such as 1) free of the hassle of storage of server-based parameters in users' smart card by registration authority, 2) free of the transmission of user-based identities to all servers in a network, 3) free of a single secret key distribution to all servers as assumed in a trusted system, and 4) free from employing costly bilinear pairing operations. In view of those shortcomings, we present an anonymous MSA protocol that nearly counters all those problems using elliptic curve cryptography and escaping costly pairing operations. Our scheme also demonstrates the scheme's robustness using formal security analysis employing random oracle model and automated tool analysis.