A novel user-participating authentication scheme

When utilizing services over public networks, a remote user authentication mechanism forms a first line of defense by rejecting illegal logins from unauthorized users. On-line applications over the Internet such as E-learning, on-line games, etc. are ever more common; remote user participation via networks plays a vital role in security and should be guaranteed. Without this countermeasure, malicious users are likely to enable agents to communicate with remote on-line systems. While existing remote user authentication schemes rarely address this issue, this paper highlights the problem of guaranteeing remote user participation. This proposed user authentication scheme benefits from combining CAPTCHA techniques and visual secret sharing to ensure deliberate human interaction. This scheme provides mutual authentication and is secure against certain known attacks, as well as low in computation cost. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.