An improved lightweight two-factor authentication and key agreement protocol with dynamic identity based on elliptic curve cryptography

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, the problem of privacy protection has been paid great attention. Recently, Nikooghadam et al. pointed out that Kumari et al.’s protocol can neither resist off-line guessing attack nor preserve user anonymity. Moreover, the authors also proposed an authentication supportive session initial protocol, claiming to resist various vulnerability attacks. Unfortunately, this paper proves that the authentication protocols of Kumari et al. and Nikooghadam et al. have neither the ability to preserve perfect forward secrecy nor the ability to resist key-compromise impersonation attack. In order to remedy such flaws in their protocols, we design a lightweight authentication protocol using elliptic curve cryptography. By way of informal security analysis, it is shown that the proposed protocol can both resist a variety of attacks and provide more security. Afterward, it is also proved that the protocol is resistant against active and passive attacks under Dolev-Yao model by means of Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic (BAN-Logic), and fulfills mutual authentication using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) software. Subsequently, we compare the protocol with the related scheme in terms of computational complexity and security. The comparative analytics witness that the proposed protocol is more suitable for practical application scenarios.