In this paper, we provide a defense mechanism to Kim–Lee–Yoo’s ID-based password authentication scheme, which is vulnerable to impersonation attacks and resource exhaustion attacks. Mutual authentication and communication privacy are regarded as essential requirements in today’s client/server-based architecture; therefore, a lightweight but secure mutual authentication method is introduced in the proposed scheme. Once the mutual authentication is successful, the session key will be established without any further computation. The proposed defense mechanism not only accomplishes the mutual authentication and the session key establishment, but also inherits the security advantages of Kim–Lee–Yoo’s scheme, e.g. it is secure against password guessing attacks and message replay attacks.
