Research Article
On the Usability of Two-Factor Authentication
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_11, author={Ding Wang and Ping Wang}, title={On the Usability of Two-Factor Authentication}, proceedings={International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 10th International ICST Conference, SecureComm 2014, Beijing, China, September 24-26, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, Part I}, proceedings_a={SECURECOMM}, year={2015}, month={11}, keywords={Two-factor authentication Usability User anonymity}, doi={10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_11} }- Ding Wang
Ping Wang
Year: 2015
On the Usability of Two-Factor Authentication
SECURECOMM
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_11
Abstract
Smart-card-based password authentication, known as two-factor authentication, is one of the most widely used security mechanisms to validate the legitimacy of a remote client, who must hold a valid smart card and the correct password in order to successfully login the server. So far the research on this domain has mainly focused on developing more secure, privacy-preserving and efficient protocols, which has led to numerous efficient proposals with a diversity of security provisions, yet little attention has been directed towards another important aspect, i.e. the usability of a scheme. This paper focuses on the study of two specific security threats on usability in two-factor authentication. Using two representative protocols as case studies, we demonstrate two types of security threats on usability: (1) Password change attack, which may easily render the smart card completely unusable by changing the password to a random value; and (2) De-synchronization attack, which breaks the consistence of the pseudo-identities between the user and the server. These threats, though realistic in practice, have been paid little attention in the literature. In addition to revealing the vulnerabilities, we discuss how to thwart these security threats and secure the protocols.