A Secure NFC-based User Authentication Scheme In
The IOT Era
Si Chen
School of Excellent Honor
Hangzhou Dianzi University
Hangzhou, China
chen.echo@qq.com
Yuhong Ma
School of Excellent Honor
Hangzhou Dianzi University
Hangzhou, China
214776742@qq.com
Qiuyun Lyu
School of Cyberspace Security
Hangzhou Dianzi University
Hangzhou, China
laqyzj@hdu.edu.cn
Qiuhua Wang
School of Cyberspace Security
Hangzhou Dianzi University
Hangzhou, China
wangqiuhua@hdu.edu.cn
Abstract—The strong development of the Internet of Things
(IoT) brings user authentication schemes much more chances and
challenges. This paper proposed a secure NFC-based user authen-
tication scheme where Semi-Trusted Third Party is involved. In
our scheme, User with NFC tag, Department mainly providing
service, Semi-Trusted Certification Center (STCC) are included
where Department and User authenticate each other via semi-
trusted STCC. Comparing with the existing similar state-of-the-
art schemes, our scheme achieves more security properties, such
as mutual authenticating, privacy enhancing, and dynamic session
key.
Keywords—Mutual authenticating; Privacy enhancing; Dy-
namic session keycomponent
I. INTRODUCTION
IoT (Internet of Things) has a wide prospect and can be
applied in almost every domain, such as health care, smart
family, transportation, logistics, business, army, electric grid
and so on. It enables heterogeneous physical devices via
technologies such as NFC
[1]
(Near Field Communication), Blue-
tooth
[2]
, Radio Frequency Identification
[3]
and biometric
scanners embedded in a lot of portable devices
[4]
. As a result,
user authentication schemes gain more chances and challenges
in the new IoT era since much more information systems will
spring up.
These years, NFC is becoming ubiquitous and pervasive, but
it also causes some unevitable issues. Credible, economical,
efficient and effective security and privacy for NFC are required
in order to ensure exact and accurate confidentiality, integrity,
authentication, and access control, among others
[6]
. But
unfortunately, NFC is extremely vulnerable in terms of all kinds
of malicious attacks. This vulnerability is the risk mostly caused
by wireless communication. Scalability factors and various
restrictions on device capabilities also mean that traditional
cryptography mechanisms, security protocols, and protection
mechanisms are unavailable or insufficient
[7]
. In addition, lots of
NFC-based components lack energy and capability of
computing. Therefore, they can’t support some security schemes
because they are too complex.
In this paper, we focus our attention on one aspect of the
application of IoT, Authentication scheme. To meet the security
demands in practical application, we propose a novel NFC-
based secure authentication scheme useing asymmetric
algorithm, nonce and keyed-hash message authentication
(HMAC), which make it possible for Department and User to
authenticate each other. In order to deploy our authentication
scheme, the User needs a smart device supporting NFC
functionality, such as a NFC-enabled smart phone.
The rest of the paper contains the following structure. In
Section II, related work is provided with regard of the NFC
technology, especially analyzing some existing authentication
schemes. Section III describes the related notations, theoretical
basis and the proposed authentication scheme in detail. Next, the
security and performance analyses are presented in Section IV.
Finally, Section V ends up with some conclusions about this
paper.
II. RELATED WORKS
Authentication is an important mechanism used since the
emergence of Internet
[8]
. Literature
[9]
also gives the development
of the IoT security standards. With a massive amount of devices
connected to the Internet and the huge data associated with it,
there remain concerns about the security
[10]
. Thus a secure
authentication scheme designed for NFC must be proposed. As
a matter of fact, the existing schemes
[11-19]
still have many
shortcomings in the aspect of security and feasibility. In the
following, some representative schemes will be mentioned.
Many password schemes involve a Trusted Third Party (TTP)
to assist their authentication, such as [11], [12], making it
difficult to keep the process secure and mutual. In [11], a NFC
service-based authentication scheme is proposed, whose main
feature is that it only needs a small storage. But when a vast
number of Users entering the system, it will cause too much
pressure on the SP server involved in the scheme. Furthermore,