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Top1. Introduction
Due to increased demand of security and fast development in communication, networking, computer software, web and mobility, there are enormous demand in better user authentication and personalization techniques. Many of the authentication systems are not very reliable specifically in ad-hoc network where two or more devices or nodes or terminals with wireless communications and networking capability communicate with each other without the aid of any centralized administrator. They can be broken, stolen or forgotten. Similarly, the attackers can control access to secured locations for passwords. For these problems, one of the most effective ways is using biometrics to avoid password to be stolen or forgotten (Srivastava et al., 2013).
Smart cards offer consistent authentication by executing challenge-response protocols without revealing implanted secret keys. This tamper resistant device is used in many applications where control over the execution of an algorithm or secrecy protection is required (Boneh et al., 1999). These are also physical security boundaries implemented to restrict the scope of physical attacks (Ferres et al., 2018). Further, reasons for its first choice are small physical size, the portability, the ease of nonvolatile memory, and the security guaranteed by a single chip computer embedded in a plastic card (Buhari et al., 2022).
But usage of smart card authentication scheme in remote environment may be difficult to users due to cost of acquiring and implementing smart card facilities. That is, installation of the necessary infrastructure for smart cards, together with the technique of uploading diverse secure access modules (SAMs) into card readers.
These problems motivate the use of external memory instead of smart card (Rhee et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2012; Jiang et al., 2013; He et al., 2013; Kumari et al., 2014). But the problem of non-tamper resistance property associated with external memory limited researches in that direction (Buhari et al., 2022).
As such, client file that exhibit light weight tamper resistance property stored in external memory can be used. The advantage of using this special client file is portability and ease of acquirement especially in schools online portals, online resources portal and e-commerce portals. A technique to make a client file in an external memory to exhibit a light weight tamper resistance property is proposed. The characteristics and design considerations that make smart card tamper resistance is reviewed. Characteristics or features that will make a client file to exhibit light weight tamper resistance property are formulated. The basic system design and software design of the proposed client file is presented and modeled. This will enable implementation of the proposed system using any prepared programming or scripting language of one’s choice. The Kumari et al., (2014) scheme which is the latest research that uses external memory for remote user authentication has been reviewed. The proposed scheme and reviewed scheme are also evaluated for efficiency, tamper resistance and impersonation attack.
The contributions of this research are as follows:
- 1.
The techniques that will enable client file residing in an external memory to exhibit light weight tamper resistance property are formulated. Followed strictly this feature during the design and implementation of the client file system will make it to be light weight tamperproof.
- 2.
The design and modeling of the proposed client file system is presented. This will enable its implementation and deployment using any programming language or scripting language of one’s choice.
The rest of this research is presented as follows: section 2 is literature review, section 3 is review of Kumari et al., (2014) scheme, section 4 is smart design review, section 5 is proposed light weight tamper resistance client file design presentation, section 6 is evaluation of the proposed system and section 7 is conclusion.