A Three-Party Password-based Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for Wireless Communications

Abstract

A three-party password-based authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocol is an important cryptographic primitive which allows two entities to establish a session key with the help of a trusted server through an insecure channel. Recently, Farash and Attari (Information Technology and Control 43(2), 143-150, 2014) presented an improved 3PAKE protocol to erase the security flaws found in Tallapally’s 3PAKE protocol (Information Technology and Control 41(1), 15-22, 2012). They claimed that their improved protocol could withstand many security attacks. However, we identified that Farash and Attari’s protocol was still sensitive to the off-line password guessing attack which directly resulted in defencelessness to the impersonation attack. In order to cope with the loopholes of Farash and Attari’s protocol, we proposed a modified 3PAKE protocol without using smart cards for wireless communications. We demonstrate that the proposed protocol can mitigate all the problems of the protocol of Farash and Attari and possess more security properties. In addition, we make a comparison among the proposed protocol and the other related protocols regarding the performance and security properties.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.44.4.9729