2009 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference On the Security of PAS (Predicate-Based Authentication Service) Honolulu, Hawaii December 07-December 11 ISBN: 978-0-7695-3919-5
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ACSAC.2009.27
Recently a new human authentication scheme called PAS (predicate-based authentication service) was proposed, which does not require the assistance of any supplementary device. The main security claim of PAS is to resist passive adversaries who can observe the whole authentication session between the human user and the remote server. In this paper we show that PAS is insecure against both brute force attack and a probabilistic attack. In particular, we show that its security against brute force attack was strongly overestimated. Furthermore, we introduce a probabilistic attack, which can break part of the password even with a very small number of observed authentication sessions. Although the proposed attack cannot completely break the password, it can downgrade the PAS system to a much weaker system similar to common OTP (one-time password) systems.
Index Terms:
PAS, authentication, Matsumoto-Imai threat model, attack, security, usability, OTP (one-time password)
Citation:
Shujun Li, Hassan Jameel Asghar, Josef Pieprzyk, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Roland Schmitz, Huaxiong Wang, "On the Security of PAS (Predicate-Based Authentication Service)," acsac, pp.209-218, 2009 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2009 Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||