A Group Authentication Scheme Supporting Cheating Detection and Identification

Group authentication is a valid scheme to make sure whether all participants belong to the same group. For nonmembers, detecting and identifying them is also necessary. So an optimized group authentication which can detect and identify the nonmembers is proposed in this paper. The group authentication is designed for group-oriented applications. A lot of user authentication schemes only support one-to-one principle of authentication. However, network applications are no longer one-to-one communication, multiple users may be involved. So the scheme proposed a many-to-many communication. The scheme is based on Shamir´s (t, n) threshold secret sharing scheme. The threshold scheme can protect a secret with high security and reliability when all the participants are honest. If some dishonest participants exist, the other honest participants may obtain a false secret which will lead to a false authentication, making them think all the participants are in the same group. It can reveal the content of the communication between them. We improve the t-secure m-user n-group authentication scheme, where t is the threshold of the scheme, m is the number of participants in the group authentication, and n is the number of members of the group. We choose a one-way function and then compute a parameter value which we will mention below. Which involve in a method to detect and identify the nonmembers in the group.