Two Birds with One Stone: Two-Factor Authentication with Security Beyond Conventional Bound

As the most prevailing two-factor authentication mechanism, smart-card-based password authentication has been a subject of intensive research in the past two decades, and hundreds of this type of schemes have wave upon wave been proposed. In most of these studies, there is no comprehensive and systematical metric available for schemes to be assessed objectively, and the authors present new schemes with assertions of the superior aspects over previous ones, while overlooking dimensions on which their schemes fare poorly. Unsurprisingly, most of them are far from satisfactory—either are found short of important security goals or lack of critical properties, especially being stuck with the security-usability tension. To overcome this issue, in this work we first explicitly define a security model that can accurately capture the practical capabilities of an adversary and then suggest a broad set of twelve properties framed as a systematic methodology for comparative evaluation, allowing schemes to be rated across a common spectrum. As our main contribution, a new scheme is advanced to resolve the various issues arising from user corruption and server compromise, and it is formally proved secure under the harshest adversary model so far. In particular, by integrating “honeywords”, traditionally the purview of system security, with a “fuzzy-verifier”, our scheme hits “two birds”: it not only eliminates the long-standing security-usability conflict that is considered intractable in the literature, but also achieves security guarantees beyond the conventional optimal security bound.