Anonymity preserving secure hash function based authentication scheme for consumer USB mass storage device

A USB (Universal Serial Bus) mass storage device, which makes a (USB) device accessible to a host computing device and enables file transfers after completing mutual authentication between the authentication server and the user. It is also very popular device because of it's portability, large storage capacity and high transmission speed. To protect the privacy of a file transferred to a storage device, several security protocols have been proposed but none of them is completely free from security weaknesses. Recently He et al. proposed a multi-factor based security protocol which is efficient but the protocol is not applicable for practical implementation, as they does not provide password change procedure which is an essential phase in any password based user authentication and key agreement protocol. As the computation and implementation of the cryptographic one-way hash function is more trouble-free than other existing cryptographic algorithms, we proposed a light weight and anonymity preserving three factor user authentication and key agreement protocol for consumer mass storage devices and analyzes our proposed protocol using BAN logic. Furthermore, we have presented informal security analysis of the proposed protocol and confirmed that the protocol is completely free from security weaknesses and applicable for practical implementation.