A Study on the Generalized Key Agreement and Password Authentication Protocol
Taekyoung KWON†, Nonmember and Jooseok SONG††, Regular Member
SUMMARY
We study how to generalize a key agreement and password authentication protocol on the basis of the well known hard problems such as a discrete logarithm problem and a Diffie-Hellman problem. The key agreement and password authentication protocol is necessary for networked or internetworked
environments to provide the user knowledge-based authentication and to establish a new cryptographic key for the further secure session. The generalized protocol implies in this paper to require only weak constraints and to be generalized easily in any other cyclic groups which preserve two hard problems.
The low entropy of password has made it difficult to design such a protocol and to prove its security soundness. In this paper, we devise a protocol which is easy to be generalized and show its security soundness in the random oracle model. The proposed protocol reduces the constraints extremely only to avoiding a smooth prime modulus. Our main contribution is in solving the password’s low entropy problem in the multiplicative group for the generalization.
key words: security, key agreement, password authentication, discrete logarithm problem
Security Analysis of the Generalized Key Agreement and Password Authentication Protocol
Her-Tyan Yeh, Hung-Min Sun, and Tzonelih Hwang, Member, IEEE
Abstract
In this letter, we show that the enhanced version of the generalized key agreement and password authentication protocol, proposed by Kwon and Song, is insecure against the off-line password guessing attacks.
Index Terms—Authentication, cryptography, key agreement, password.
I. INTRODUCTION
II. Entity authentication is one of the most important security services. It is necessary to verify the identities of the communication parties when they start a connection. This service is usually provided in combination with a key generation scheme between the parties. In 1992, Bellovin and Merritt [1] presented the well-known Encrypted Key Exchange protocol (EKE in short) such that two parties can authenticate each other and generate a session key via a shared password in advance. In general, people tend to choose an easy-to-remember password (or referred to as “weak passwords”), which is vulnerable to password guessing attacks (or referred to as “dictionary attacks”) if some verifiable information for the password is provided. EKE can resist the off-line password guessing attacks due to giving insufficient information to verify a guessed password (note that it is natural that the on-line password guessing attack can not be defeated by means of protocols themselves). Since then, a number of key agreement and password authentication protocols have been proposed [2]–[10] to defeat the off-line password guessing attacks. Recently, following EKE protocol, Kwon and Song [11] proposed a password-based authentication and key agreement protocol against the off-line password guessing attacks. Here, we call it the fundamental protocol. In order to reduce the transmission steps, he also proposed an enhanced version based on the fundamental protocol. In this letter, we point out that the enhanced version is insecure against the off-line password guessing attacks. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we review the Kwon-Song protocols. In Section III, we point out that the enhanced version is insecure against the off-line password guessing attack. Finally, Section IV gives our conclusions.
Reflection Attack on a Generalized Key Agreement and Password Authentication Protocol
Wei-Chi Ku, Hui-Lung Lee and Chien-Ming Chen SUMMARY
In this letter, we show that a key agreement and password authentication protocol proposed by Kwon and Song is potentially vulnerable to a reflection attack, and then suggest simple improvements.
key words: authentication, key agreement, password, reflection attack 1. Introduction
Existing password authentication and key agreement protocols fall into two broad categories, one requires only low-entropy (easy-to-remember) passwords, e.g., [1]–[8], and the other must use high-entropy (difficult-to-remember) passwords, e.g., [9]–[11]. Clearly, using high-entropy passwords increases the memory burden of users. Although users can alternatively use tamper-resistant storage tokens, e.g., IC cards, to store their high-entropy passwords, however, it will eliminate the expected advantage of using passwords, i.e., convenience. In contrast, a protocol based on low-entropy passwords should avoid revealing verifiable information to the public, otherwise, the adversary can directly perform an off-line password guessing attack to obtain passwords. Although a protocol based on low-entropy passwords usually leads heavy computational load to its application systems, it has the advantage over a protocol based on high-entropy passwords in that it does not incur memory burden or inconvenience to users. Since we only focus on the security analysis of a protocol based on low-entropy passwords, ‘low-entropy password’ is hereafter referred to as ‘password’ for short. In 2000, Kwon and Song [12] proposed a generalized key agreement and password authentication protocol. For constrained environments, they also presented a condensed variant of their original protocol with fewer steps. Later, Yeh et al. [13] demonstrated that Kwon- Song’s condensed protocol is vulnerable to an off-line password guessing attack. In this letter, we will show that Kwon- Song’s original protocol is potentially vulnerable to a reflection attack [14]. Furthermore, we will also suggest simple improvements for Kwon-Song’s original protocol.
Off-line password-guessing attacks on the generalized key agreement and password authentication protocol
Kyungah Shim
Department of Mathematics, Ewha Womans University, 11-1 Daehyun-dong,
Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 120-750, South Korea
Abstract
In this paper, we show that the generalized key agreement and password authentication
protocol, proposed by Kwon and Song [T. Kwon, J. Song, A study on the generalized
key agreement and password authentication protocol, IEICE Trans. Comm. E83-E
(9) (2000) 2044–2050], is vulnerable to off-line password guessing attacks.
2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Two entities, who only share a password, and who are communicating over an insecure network, want to authenticate each other and agree on a session key to be used for protecting their subsequent communication. This is called the password-authenticated key exchange problem. The first password-authenticated
key exchange (PAKE) protocol, known as Encrypted Key Exchange (EKE), was suggested by Bellovin and Merritt [1]. By using a combination of symmetric and public-key cryptography, EKE resists dictionary attacks by giving a passive attacker insufficient information to verify a guessed password. Since it was invented, many password-authenticated key agreement protocols that promised increased security have been developed [2–4,6,7,9,10,12].