Physical-Unclonable-Function-Based Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication for Multiserver Architectures

To support more complex and robust online services, enterprise-class applications prefer to interconnect multiple servers as the pedestal to enhance the system’s interoperability. However, the multiserver architecture always struggles to reconcile the trade-off between convenience and security, leaving users exposed to a variety of network attack threats. Existing security authentication schemes based on the Chebyshev Chaotic Map for multiserver architectures cannot provide three-factor (including password, biometric feature, and smart card) security. Therefore, we propose a novel Physical-Unclonable-Function-based Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication (PUF-LTA) scheme, which can achieve three-factor security. The PUF-LTA scheme mainly includes two components: (1) PUF-assisted registration and (2) lightweight mutual authentication with one-time interaction. During the PUF-assisted registration process, to defend against side-channel attacks on smart cards, the login credentials of users are XORed with the unique identifier generated by the PUF so that the adversary cannot obtain these secret login credentials. During the lightweight mutual authentication process, we combine the Chebyshev polynomial map and symmetric encryption/decryption to negotiate the session key between users and servers, which only needs one interaction. The security performance of PUF-LTA is theoretically proved by leveraging the random oracle model. In contrast with relevant multiserver authentication schemes, PUF-LTA is more efficient and suitable for resource-constrained multiserver environments because it can ensure secure three-factor authentication and support flexible biometrics and password updates with less computation cost.