The democratization of Internet access has allowed more and more companies to digitize their services. As new services are offered on the network, there is growing concern about the possibility of undue access to sensitive information from users, businesses and government. The increase in the number of attacks and theft of credentials has forced service delivery companies to develop new security solutions. In response to these attacks, user authentication mechanisms have evolved. Many services have migrated their authentication methods from one-factor approaches to multifactor approaches where the user needs more than one credential to access the system. 

 

A novel method for user authentication based on multifactor approach is presented. For this security technique, a user authenticates into a system using a set of three characteristics related to physical, possession and knowledge factors. Biometrics authentication represents the physical factor. An optical authentication technique based on two-beam interference and chaotic maps complete the proposed scheme. In this sense, the seed of a chaotic map represents a user password corresponding to a knowledge factor and a resultant interferogram from an optical authentication technique represents the possession factor. Numerical simulation demonstrate the feasibility of our method. Moreover, we perform key space, sensibility and statistical analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution. In addition, some comparisons are made with the methods available in the literature.