14 Facts About Mutual authentication

Mutual authentication is a desired characteristic in verification schemes that transmit sensitive data, in order to ensure data security.

Mutual authentication can be accomplished with two types of credentials: usernames and passwords, and public key certificates.

Mutual authentication is a crucial security step that can defend against many adversarial attacks, which otherwise can have large consequences if IoT systems are hacked.

In scheme analyses done of past works, a lack of mutual authentication had been considered a weakness in data transmission schemes.

Mutual TLS authentication is more often used in business-to-business applications, where a limited number of programmatic and homogeneous clients are connecting to specific web services, the operational burden is limited, and security requirements are usually much higher as compared to consumer environments.

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One solution to keep schemes lightweight during the mutual authentication process is to limit the number of bits used during communication.

However, the authentication still occurs through insecure channels, so researchers believe it is still important to ensure mutual authentication occurs in order to keep a secure scheme.

In mutual authentication schemes that require a user's input password as part of the verification process, there is a higher vulnerability to hackers because the password is human-made rather than a computer-generated certificate.

Researchers note that a password based protocol with mutual authentication is important because user identities and passwords are still protected, as the messages are only readable to the two parties involved.

However, a negative aspect about password-based Mutual authentication is that password tables can take up a lot of memory space.

One way around using a lot of memory during a password-based Mutual authentication scheme is to implement one-time passwords, which is a password sent to the user via SMS or email.

Mutual authentication is often found in schemes employed in the Internet of Things, where physical objects are incorporated into the Internet and can communicate via IP address.

Mutual authentication can be satisfied in radio network schemes, where data transmissions through radio frequencies are secure after verifying the sender and receiver.

However, a large concern for healthcare providers and patients about using remote health data tracking is that sensitive patient data is being transmitted through unsecured channels, so Mutual authentication occurs between the medical body area network user, the Healthcare Service Provider and the trusted third party.