A secure authentication protocol using HOTP on USB storage devices

The external storage using a universal serial bus (USB) communication become the most popular use for storing digital data. Application such as evidence acquisition in digital forensic area needs external storage devices that are portable, high speed of data transfer, and easy to use for collecting digital data from suspect computers. Apart from these advantages of USB storage devices, they do not have a built-in function to authenticate users. If unauthorized users obtain this device with some utilities installed in it, they might use it as a weapon to attack or steal valuable information from anyone. To avoid this situation, this paper proposes a two-factor authentication technique in order to solve such problem, as well as to limit the software usage in which users can run it inside that assigned device only. That means no unauthorized users can make a copy version and distribute it to other devices and run the software. The result from the experiment shows that the proposed authentication protocol is able to achieve all goals of this paper.