Abstract
The simple password based authentication techniques have been evolving into more secure and advanced protocols, capable of countering the advanced breed of threats. Following this development, the multi-server authentication (MSA), lets subscribers the provision of services from various service providers out of a single registration performed initially. The user seeks to register from registration centre first, and could avail a range of services onwards. The research efforts on MSA based framework, for making it lightweight and security resilient, has been going on a reasonable pace. However, yet we have not come up with a framework that can be relied upon for deployment in an access network bearing nodes that demand low computational cost. Recently, in this regard, Tsai and Lo presented a chaotic map-based multi-server authentication protocol. However, the Tsai and Lo scheme is found vulnerable to key-compromise impersonation attack, Bergamo et al. and password guessing attack by Lu et al. In return, Lu et al. presented a model countering the flaws of Tsai and Lo scheme. We review both schemes and found that Tsai et al. is still vulnerable to more threats, and at the same time, we demonstrate that Lu et al. is also vulnerable to RC-spoofing attack, replay attack, anonymity failure and bears some technical flaws. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient scheme improved upon Tsai et al. protocol. Besides, this study work presents the formal security analysis using BAN logic and performance efficiency has also been evaluated against contemporary protocols.