Remote Authentication with Forward Security

Password authentication has been accepted as an easy-to-use solution in network environment to protect unauthorized access to a remote server. Although many schemes have been proposed, none of them can achieve survivability in case of compromise of a server. Once a server’s secret key is leaked, the system is totally broken, and all the legally registered users have to be rejected for security reason, which is the most undesirable tragedy in business applications. In this paper, we propose a remote authentication scheme with forward security to reduce the potential damages caused by key exposure problem in authentication schemes. In our scheme, an intruder can not masquerade as an legal user registered at previous periods even if he has obtained server’s secret keys.