A new pre-authentication protocol in Kerberos 5: biometric authentication

Abstract

Kerberos is a well-known network authentication protocol that allows nodes to communicate over a non-secure network connection. After Kerberos is used to prove the identity of objects in client-server model, it will encrypt all of their communications in following steps to assure privacy and data integrity. In this paper, we modify the initial authentication exchange in Kerberos 5 by using biometric data and asymmetric cryptography. This proposed method creates a new preauthentication protocol in order to make Kerberos 5 more secure. Due to the proposed method, the limitation of password-based authentication in Kerberos 5 is solved. It is too difficult for a user to repudiate having accessed to the application. Moreover, the mechanism of user authentication is more convenient. This method is a strong authentication scheme that is against several attacks.