Novel Anonymous Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

Smart card based authentication scheme has been widely utilized for various transaction-oriented services such as electronic currency exchange, social insurance payment and e-commerce payment charge in modern society. How to develop a smart card based authentication scheme to support initiator untraceability and defend against major security threats for a transaction service user has become a crucial topic for researchers. Recent efforts for developing anonymous authentication scheme with smart card have failed to provide initiator untraceability for user or been vulnerable to some security attacks. This paper first presents a security model for anonymous authentication and then proposes a new anonymous authentication scheme using smart card. Security robustness of the proposed scheme is constructed by one-way hash function and elliptic curve cryptosystem. Our security analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves general security requirement and offers initiator untraceability for user without requiring database support. Performance analysis on communication overhead and computation cost shows that the proposed scheme has better or similar efficiency in comparison with other existing smart card based authentication schemes.