Trustless Two-Factor Authentication Using Smart Contracts in Blockchains

Abstract

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is widely prevalent in banking, emails and virtual private networks (VPN) connections or in accessing any secure web service. In 2FA, to get authenticated the users are expected to provide additional secret information along with the password. Typically, this secret information (tokens) is generated by a centralized trusted third party upon receiving an authentication request from users. Thus, this additional layer of security comes at the cost of inherently trusting the third party for their services. The security of such authentication systems is always under the threat of the trusted party is being compromised. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to make server authentication even more secure by building 2FA over the blockchain platform which is distributed in nature. The proposed solution does not require any trusted third party between claimant (user) and the verifier (server) for the authentication purpose. To demonstrate the idea of using blockchain technology for 2FA, we have added an extra layer of security component to the OpenSSH server a widely used application for Secure Shell (SSH) protocol.