An enhanced Kerberos protocol with non-interactive zero-knowledge proof

As one of the most important trusted third-party-based authentication protocols, Kerberos is widely used to provide authentication service in distributed networks. However, it is vulnerable to common brute force password-guessing attacks because of its password-based mechanism. Some enhanced Kerberos protocols based on public key cryptography were proposed as solutions, but they require excessive computation and communication resources. In this paper, a new enhanced Kerberos protocol with non-interactive zero-knowledge proof is proposed, in which the clients and the authentication server can mutually authenticate each other without revealing any information during the authentication process. Our security analysis and experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme can resist password-guessing attacks and is more convenient and efficient than previous schemes. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.