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Separating Symmetric and Asymmetric Password-Authenticated Key Exchange

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Security and Cryptography for Networks (SCN 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12238))

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Abstract

Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) is a method to establish cryptographic keys between two users sharing a low-entropy password. In its asymmetric version, one of the users acts as a server and only stores some function of the password, e.g., a hash. Upon server compromise, the adversary learns \(H(\mathsf {pw})\). Depending on the strength of the password, the attacker now has to invest more or less work to reconstruct \(\mathsf {pw} \) from \(H(\mathsf {pw})\). Intuitively, asymmetric PAKE seems more challenging than symmetric PAKE since the latter is not supposed to protect the password upon compromise. In this paper, we provide three contributions:

  • Separating symmetric and asymmetric PAKE. We prove that a strong assumption like a programmable random oracle is necessary to achieve security of asymmetric PAKE in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. For symmetric PAKE, programmability is not required. Our results also rule out the existence of UC-secure asymmetric PAKE in the CRS model.

  • Revising the security definition. We identify and close some gaps in the UC security definition of 2-party asymmetric PAKE given by Gentry, MacKenzie and Ramzan (Crypto 2006). For this, we specify a natural corruption model for server compromise attacks. We further remove an undesirable weakness that lets parties wrongly believe in security of compromised session keys. We demonstrate usefulness by proving that the \(\varOmega \)-method proposed by Gentry et al. satisfies our new security notion for asymmetric PAKE. To our knowledge, this is the first formal security proof of the \(\varOmega \)-method in the literature.

  • Composable multi-party asymmetric PAKE. We showcase how our revisited security notion for 2-party asymmetric PAKE can be used to obtain asymmetric PAKE protocols in the multi-user setting and discuss important aspects for implementing such a protocol.

J. Hesse—This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 786725 – OLYMPUS.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A protocol without explicit authentication can be proven to securely realize \(\mathcal {F} _\textsf {aPAKE} \) with the NewKey interface of the symmetric PAKE functionality \(\mathcal {F} _\textsf {rpwKE} \).

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jiayu Xu, Dennis Hofheinz, David Pointcheval and Victor Shoup for helpful discussions. Discussion with Victor on how to resolve issues with session identifiers for the multi-user setting were particularly instructing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research, Zurich, Switzerland

    Julia Hesse

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  1. Julia Hesse
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Correspondence to Julia Hesse .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Clemente Galdi

  2. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Vladimir Kolesnikov

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Hesse, J. (2020). Separating Symmetric and Asymmetric Password-Authenticated Key Exchange. In: Galdi, C., Kolesnikov, V. (eds) Security and Cryptography for Networks. SCN 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57990-6_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57990-6_29

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