A MUTUAL AUTHENTICATION SCHEME FOR LOW COSTSMART CARD APPLICATIONS

Smart cards will soon exist in virtually every area of our lives. These IC chip cards will control our access to a growing number of public facilities. The technology promises much and is very flexible in the sense that it can be designed and manufactured to serve a multitude of purposes. The power of these cards lies in their ability to store and manipulate data, to handle multiple applications on the card, and to perform secure transactions. Considering the sensitive nature of information that these cards will eventually carry, there is a strong need to protect these cards and hence the data inside the cards from misuse, be it from card theft or through a fake terminals. Authentication is one such technique, which provides the first line of defense in any security system. Authentication is the process whereby a process can verify the claimed identity of the other party in a communicating pair. In this paper, we propose a mutual authentication protocol for smart cards based on Blom's scheme. The proposed scheme can be used to provide secure authentication between a smart card and a smart card terminal, where the smart card will eventually be inserted to access a service. The scheme provides a mechanism whereby a terminal will be able to distinguish an authorized smart card from an unauthorized one. It also provides a means where a smart card will be able to distinguish an authorized terminal from an unauthorized one.