Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Improving The Security And Flexibility Of One-Time Passwords By Signature Chains, Kemal Biçakci, Nazi̇fe Baykal

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

While the classical attack of ``monitor the network and intercept the password'' can be avoided by advanced protocols like SSH, one-time passwords are still considered a viable alternative or a supplement for software authentication since they are the only ones that safeguard against attacks on insecure client machines. In this paper by using public-key techniques we present a method called signature chain alternative to Lamport's hash chain to improve security and flexibility of one-time passwords. Our proposition improves the security because first, like other public-key authentication protocols, the server and the user do not share a secret, thereby eliminating attacks …