A secure biometric based multi-server authentication scheme for social multimedia networks

Social networking is one of the major source of massive data. Such data is not only difficult to store, manipulate and maintain but it's open access makes it security prone. Therefore, robust and efficient authentication should be devised to make it invincible against the known security attacks. Moreover, social networking services are intrinsically multi-server environments, therefore compatible and suitable authentication should be designed accordingly. Sundry authentication protocols are being utilized at the moment and many of them are designed for single server architecture. This type of remote architecture resists each user to get itself register with each server if multiple servers are employed to offer online social services. Recently multi-server architecture for authentication has replaced the single server architecture, and it enable users to register once and procure services from multiple servers. A short time ago, Lu et al. presented two authentication schemes based on three factors. Furthermore, both Lu et al.'s schemes are designed for multi-server architecture. Lu et al. claimed the schemes to be invincible against the known attacks. However, this paper shows that one of the Lu et al.'s scheme is susceptible to user anonymity violation and impersonation attacks, whereas Lu et al.'s second scheme is susceptible to user impersonation attack. Therefore an enhanced scheme is introduced in this paper. The proposed scheme is more robust than subsisting schemes. The proposed scheme is thoroughly verified and validated with formal and informal security discussion, and through the popular automated tool ProVerif. The in-depth analysis affirms that proposed scheme is lightweight in terms of computations while attaining mutual authentication and is invincible against the known attacks, hence is more suitable for automated big data analysis for social multimedia networking environments.