A Secure Three-Factor Authentication Protocol for E-Governance System Based on Multiserver Environments

In electronic governance (e-governance) system, citizens can access government services such as transportation, licensing and immigration remotely over the Internet. With the development of information and communication technology, usage of the e-governance system has been increased. To efficiently provide citizens with various e-governance services, multi-server environments can be applied to the e-governance system. However, messages can be inserted, deleted, and modified by a malicious adversary since these are transmitted through a public channel. Therefore, many researchers have suggested mutual authentication protocols for secure communication in multi-server environments. In 2020, Sudhakar et al. proposed a smart card based lightweight authentication protocol for multi-server environments. We analyze Sudhakar et al.'s protocol to propose a secure mutual authentication protocol in the e-governance system based on multi-server environments. However, we disclosure that their protocol is not resistant to smart card stolen, insider, man-in-the-middle, user impersonation, and session key disclosure attacks. Moreover, Sudhakar et al.'s protocol does not provide mutual authentication. To improve these security problems, we suggest a secure three-factor mutual authentication protocol for the e-governance system based on multi-server environments. We prove our protocol's security using informal security analysis, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, and Real-or-Random (ROR) model. We also simulate our protocol utilizing Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. We estimate the proposed protocol's security functionalities, computation costs, and communication overheads compared with existing related protocols. Consequently, we demonstrate that our protocol is secure and suitable for the e-governance system.