A General Architecture for Multiserver Authentication Key Agreement with Provable Security

Abstract

In a typical single-server architecture, when a user wishes to access multiple servers to obtain different services, the user needs to register with every single server. This results in multiple identities and password pairs. To eliminate the limitation of the user having to possess and remember multiple identities and password pairs, a number of multiserver authentication protocols have been proposed where a user only needs to register once. However, most existing protocols are subsequently found to be insecure and this topic remains one of the ongoing research interests. Thus, in this paper, we present a multiserver authentication key agreement protocol. We then demonstrate the security of the protocol under the random oracle model, as well as the practicality of the protocol in terms of low computation and communication costs, minimal storage requirements, and operation costs.