On the Security of a Simple Three-Party Key Exchange Protocol without Server’s Public Keys

Abstract

Authenticated key exchange protocols are of fundamental importance in securing communications and are now extensively deployed for use in various real-world network applications. In this work, we reveal major previously unpublished security vulnerabilities in the password-based authenticated three-party key exchange protocol according to Lee and Hwang (2010): (1) the Lee-Hwang protocol is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack and thus fails to achieve implicit key authentication; (2) the protocol cannot protect clients' passwords against an offline dictionary attack; and (3) the indistinguishability-based security of the protocol can be easily broken even in the presence of a passive adversary. We also propose an improved password-based authenticated three-party key exchange protocol that addresses the security vulnerabilities identified in the Lee-Hwang protocol.

Security Improvement on Biometric Based Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Fuzzy Extraction

“…Therefore, the lack of anonymity in Yoon and Kim's scheme raises some problems that need to be addressed by providing user anonymity through a protection technique. To solve this problem, it is necessary to use anonymity identification AID in the WSNs communication instead of sending a normal ID [21][22][23].…”

Two-Round Password-Only Authenticated Key Exchange in the Three-Party Setting

“…S-IA-3PAKE, S-EA-3PAKE [23] Vulnerable to an offline dictionary attack and a man-in-the-middle attack [31] Invalidated by a passive attack (see Section 3.…”

“…Many of these protocols have never been proven secure in any model [3,13,[17][18][19][20][21] and/or have been found to be vulnerable to some attack(s) [2,3,5,6,8,[18][19][20]23,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Some protocols [2,11,12,15,23,24] have been proven secure only in a restricted model, in which the adversary is not allowed to corrupt protocol participants, and thus, no attacks by malicious clients can be captured.…”

“…• The protocols of [15,24] are the only two-round, three-party PAKE protocols published with a claimed security proof (although the two protocols presented by Lee and Hwang [23] can run in two rounds (without key confirmation), and they are insecure in the presence of a malicious client [31]; both protocols are susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack, as well as an offline dictionary attack). However, it was later found that both protocols are not secure against an active adversary, and their associated claims of provable security are invalid (see [2,8,32,33] and Section 3 of this paper).…”

Enhanced Biometric-based User Authentication Protocol Using Non-tamper Resistant Smart Cards

“…One of the fundamental problems in the areas of cryptography and communication security is authentication to enable two parties communicating over a public network to establish a high-entropy secret key from their low entropy passwords [1]. Many password based authentication protocols were designed to solve this problem and often showed the security vulnerabilities including password guessing attack, replay attack, insider attack, and many more attacks [2][3][4][5][6][7][8].…”