Two-Server password-only authenticated key exchange

  • Authors:
  • Jonathan Katz;Philip MacKenzie;Gelareh Taban;Virgil Gligor

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland;DoCoMo USA Labs;Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland;Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland

  • Venue:
  • ACNS'05 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Typical protocols for password-based authentication assume a single server which stores all the information (e.g.), the password necessary to authenticate a user. Unfortunately, an inherent limitation of this approach (assuming low-entropy passwords are used) is that the user's password is exposed if this server is ever compromised. To address this issue, a number of schemes have been proposed in which a user's password information is shared among multiple servers, and these servers cooperate in a threshold manner when the user wants to authenticate. We show here a two-server protocol for this task assuming public parameters available to everyone in the system (as well as the adversary). Ours is the first provably-secure two-server protocol for the important password-only setting (in which the user need remember only a password, and not the servers' public keys), and is the first two-server protocol (in any setting) with a proof of security in the standard model.