Lightweight Technical Implementation of Single Sign-On Authentication and Key Agreement Mechanism for Multiserver Architecture-Based Systems

Authentication is the primary and mandatory process for any Information and Communication Technology (ICT) application to prove the legitimacy of the genuine user. It becomes more important and crucial for public platforms like e-governance platforms. The Government of India is transforming the country into Digital India through various e-governance initiatives based on ICT. For authentication, National e-Authentication Framework (NeAF) was proposed by the Indian government which is a policy framework for authentication. This framework does not provide any technical and unified solution for authentication systems while it is based on centralized verification data. In this paper, we proposed a solution for the authentication which provides the unified authentication solution for the Indian e-governance system with existing infrastructure. This solution also provides the features such as scalability, security, and transparency based on distributed computing and working on multiserver architecture. This solution also fulfills the need of the current Indian government to provide multiple e-governance services through a single smart card.