Title
A new protocol to counter online dictionary attacks
Abstract
The most popular method of authenticating users is through passwords. Though passwords are the most convenient means of authentication, they bring along themselves the threat of dictionary attacks. While offline dictionary attacks are possible only if the adversary is able to collect data for a successful protocol execution by eavesdropping on the communication channel and can be successfully countered by using public key cryptography, online dictionary attacks can be performed by anyone and there is no satisfactory solution to counter them. In this paper, we propose an authentication protocol which is easy to implement without any infrastructural changes and yet prevents online dictionary attacks. Our protocol uses only one way hash functions and eliminates online dictionary attacks by implementing a challenge-response system. This challenge-response system is designed in a fashion that it hardly poses any difficulty to a genuine user but is extremely burdensome, time consuming and computationally intensive for an adversary trying to launch as many as hundreds of thousands of authentication requests as in case of an online dictionary attack. The protocol is perfectly stateless and thus less vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1016/j.cose.2005.09.003
Computers and Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
hash functions,online dictionary attacks,authentication,passwords,cryptographic protocol,communication channels,denial of service,dos attack,authentication protocol,dictionary attack,hash function,public key cryptography
Dictionary attack,Internet privacy,Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol,Computer security,Computer science,Challenge–response authentication,Cryptographic hash function,Otway–Rees protocol,Authentication protocol,Salt (cryptography),Cryptographic nonce
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
25
2
Computers & Security
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.92
7
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vipul Goyal12859129.53
Virendra Kumar2744.58
Mayank Singh3674.98
Ajith Abraham48954729.23
Sugata Sanyal548165.88