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Provably Secure Password-based Authentication in TLS

Conference ·
OSTI ID:881394

In this paper, we show how to design an efficient, provably secure password-based authenticated key exchange mechanism specifically for the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol. The goal is to provide a technique that allows users to employ (short) passwords to securely identify themselves to servers. As our main contribution, we describe a new password-based technique for user authentication in TLS, called Simple Open Key Exchange (SOKE). Loosely speaking, the SOKE ciphersuites are unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman ciphersuites in which the client's Diffie-Hellman ephemeral public value is encrypted using a simple mask generation function. The mask is simply a constant value raised to the power of (a hash of) the password.The SOKE ciphersuites, in advantage over previous pass-word-based authentication ciphersuites for TLS, combine the following features. First, SOKE has formal security arguments; the proof of security based on the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption is in the random oracle model, and holds for concurrent executions and for arbitrarily large password dictionaries. Second, SOKE is computationally efficient; in particular, it only needs operations in a sufficiently large prime-order subgroup for its Diffie-Hellman computations (no safe primes). Third, SOKE provides good protocol flexibility because the user identity and password are only required once a SOKE ciphersuite has actually been negotiated, and after the server has sent a server identity.

Research Organization:
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley NationalLaboratory, Berkeley, CA (US)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE. Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.Mathematical Information and Computing Sciences Division; EuropeanCommission. IST program Contract IST-2002-507932 ECRYPT
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
881394
Report Number(s):
LBNL--57609-Ext.-Abs.; BnR: YN0100000
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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