A Novel Smart Card Authentication Scheme using Image Watermarking

One of the primary issues of information technology and communication is the security of information from unwanted frauds. For every transaction over insecure channel authentication is required. Since the rise of the Internet smart card authentication schemes have been widely used to avoid the problems related to traditional password based authentication schemes. However, most of the smart card authentication schemes are exposed to one or the other possible attack. This paper describes a novel smart card authentication scheme using image watermarking which covers all the identified security pitfalls and satisfies the needs of a user. Its security is based on hiding the message in an image. In addition, it provides users to choose and change their passwords freely and mutual authentication. Moreover, it uses nonce instead of timestamp to resist replay attack. Security analysis proves that the proposed scheme is secure against impersonation attack, password guessing attack, replay attack, reflection attack, parallel session attack, insider attack, stolen verifier attack, smart card loss attack and man-in-the-middle attack.