The Fairy-Ring Dance: Password Authenticated Key Exchange in a Group

In this paper, we study Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) in a group. First, we present a generic ``fairy-ring dance\u27\u27 construction that transforms any secure two-party PAKE scheme to a group PAKE protocol while preserving the round efficiency in the optimal way. Based on this generic construction, we present two concrete instantiations based on using SPEKE and J-PAKE as the underlying PAKE primitives respectively. The first protocol, called SPEKE+, accomplishes authenticated key exchange in a group with explicit key confirmation in just two rounds. This is more round-efficient than any existing group PAKE protocols in the literature. The second protocol, called J-PAKE+, requires one more round than SPEKE+, but is computationally faster. Finally, we present full implementations of SPEKE+ and J-PAKE+ with detailed performance measurements. Our experiments suggest that both protocols are feasible for practical applications in which the group size may vary from three to several dozen. This makes them useful, as we believe, for a wide range of applications -- e.g., to bootstrap secure communication among a group of smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT)

Key exchange with the help of a public ledger

Blockchains and other public ledger structures promise a new way to create globally consistent event logs and other records. We make use of this consistency property to detect and prevent man-in-the-middle attacks in a key exchange such as Diffie-Hellman or ECDH. Essentially, the MitM attack creates an inconsistency in the world views of the two honest parties, and they can detect it with the help of the ledger. Thus, there is no need for prior knowledge or trusted third parties apart from the distributed ledger. To prevent impersonation attacks, we require user interaction. It appears that, in some applications, the required user interaction is reduced in comparison to other user-assisted key-exchange protocols

Cryptanalysis of an e_cient three-party password-based key exchange scheme

AbstractIn order to secure communications between two clients with a trusted server's help in public network environments, a three-party password-based authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) scheme is used to provide the transaction confidentiality and e_ciency. In 2010, Lou-Huang proposed a new simple three-party password-based authenticated key exchange (LH-3PAKE) scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). By analysis, Lou-Huang claimed that the proposed LH- 3PAKE scheme is not only secure against various attacks, but also more e_cient than previously proposed 3PAKE schemes. However, this paper demonstrates LH-3PAKE scheme is vulnerable to o_-line password guessing attacks by an attacker

Session Initiation Protocol Attacks and Challenges

In recent years, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has become widely used in current internet protocols. It is a text-based protocol much like Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) and Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP). SIP is a strong enough signaling protocol on the internet for establishing, maintaining, and terminating session. In this paper the areas of security and attacks in SIP are discussed. We consider attacks from diverse related perspectives. The authentication schemes are compared, the representative existing solutions are highlighted, and several remaining research challenges are identified. Finally, the taxonomy of SIP threat will be presented