Novel multi-server authentication protocol using secret sharing

Due to the rapid growth of computer networks, many network environments have been becoming multi-server based. There has been a number of methods proposed for authentication in multi-server environments. Many of these methods achieve mutual authentication by sending encrypted or hashed secret information across the network which make them vulnerable to various Man-In-The-Middle attacks. This paper proposes a new scheme for authentication in which only a part of the secret is sent across the network. This has been achieved by using an image secret sharing scheme. The security analysis of this method proves that the method is strong and efficient to prevent attacks and establishing a secret session key.