An efficient and complete remote user authentication scheme using smart cards

In this paper, we propose an efficient and complete remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. Compared with other smart card-based schemes, our scheme achieves more functionality. The important merits include: (1) a dictionary of verification tables is not required to authenticate users; (2) users can choose their password freely; (3) mutual authentication is provided between the user and the remote system; (4) the communication cost and the computational cost are very low; (5) users can update their password after the registration phase; (6) a session key agreed by the user and the remote system is generated in every session; and (7) the nonce-based scheme does not require a timestamp to solve the serious time synchronization problem.