A more secure anonymous user authentication scheme for the integrated EPR information system

Secure and efficient user mutual authentication is an essential task for integrated electronic patient record (EPR) information system. Recently, several authentication schemes have been proposed to meet this requirement. In a recent paper, Lee et al. proposed an efficient and secure password-based authentication scheme used smart cards for the integrated EPR information system. This scheme is believed to have many abilities to resist a range of network attacks. Especially, they claimed that their scheme could resist lost smart card attack. However, we reanalyze the security of Lee et al.'s scheme, and show that it fails to protect off-line password guessing attack if the secret information stored in the smart card is compromised. This also renders that their scheme is insecure against user impersonation attacks. Then, we propose a new user authentication scheme for integrated EPR information systems based on the quadratic residues. The new scheme not only resists a range of network attacks but also provides user anonymity. We show that our proposed scheme can provide stronger security.