Smart card based password authentication and user anonymity scheme using ECC and steganography

In this information age, providing security over the Internet is a major issue. Internet security is all about trust at a remote distance, because we are dealing with everyone remotely and not able to confirm identity or authenticity in the traditional sense. To increase the password authentication a scheme was proposed by Chun-Ta Li which is basically a smart card-based password authentication and update scheme. The Chun's scheme provides user anonymity and eviction of unauthorized users. In our research work we have crypt analyze the Chun's method and shown that it is vulnerable to various types of attacks: insider attack, off line password verifier attack, stolen verifier attack and impersonating attack. To overcome the security vulnerability of Chun's scheme, we have proposed an advance scheme of password authentication and user anonymity using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and stegnography. The proposed scheme also provides privacy to the client. Based on scheme performance criteria such as immunity to known attacks and functional features, we came to the conclusion that the proposed scheme is much efficient and solves several hard security threats.