Abstract or Summary:
This paper describes a password authentication method called PERM and its application to e-mail forwarding services. This method is advantageous and suitable for communications on insecure network environments such as the Internet. It can be easily adapted to Internet appliances or Java applets which have limited performance. With the PERM method in each authentication session, the prover has only to compute three pieces of authentication data and send them to the verifier. The PERM method does not require password resettings and enables high-speed authentication processing with a small-sized program.

The rest of the paper is devoted to verifying the feasibility of the PERM method by applying to an e-mail forwarding service, since e-mail has become indispensable for communications on the Internet, especially for the many business fields.