• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.42 no.2
• /
• pp.349-357
• /
• 2017

Many Web sites adopt SMS(Short Message Service)-based user authentication when a user loses her password or approves an online payment. In SMS-based authentication, the authentication server sends a text in plaintext to a user's phone, and it allows an attacker who eavesdrops or intercepts the text to impersonate a valid user(victim). We propose a challenge-response scheme to prove to the authentication server that a user is in a certain place at the moment with her smartphone beside her. The proposed scheme generates a response using a challenge by the server, user's current location, and a secret on the user's smartphone all together. Consequently, the scheme is much more secure than SMS-based authentication that simply asks a user to send the same text arrived on her phone back to the server. In addition to entering the response, which substitutes the SMS text, the scheme also requests a user to input a passphrase to get the authentication process started. We believe, however, the additional typing should be tolerable to most users considering the enhanced security level of the scheme.