One-time password authentication scheme based on the negative database

In this paper, a novel one-time password authentication scheme based on the negative database (NDB) is proposed. The authentication data, which involve a user password and random number, are converted to an NDB before they are transmitted to the network. Recovering the original database (DB) from an NDB is an NP-hard problem. Even if the data transmitted in the network have been intercepted by an attacker, the attacker cannot recover the password due to the hardness of reversing the NDB. The proposed scheme is the first one-time password authentication scheme based on the NDB. Following the method used in this paper, the NDB can be added to other authentication schemes as an extra layer to further improve security. The proposed scheme can be adopted into other applications such as business management, network-based consumer electronics, and intelligent household systems.