Paper 2011/336

Cryptanalysis of an Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Mobile Communications

Debiao He

Abstract

With the rapid progress of wireless mobile communication, the authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol has attracted an increasing amount of attention. However, due to the limitations of bandwidth and storage of the mobile devices, most of the existing AKA protocols are not suitable for wireless mobile communication. Recently, Lo et al. presented an efficient authenticated key agreement protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography and included their protocol in 3GPP2 specifications. However, in this letter, we point out that Lo et al.'s protocol is vulnerable to an off-line password guessing attack. To resist the attack, we also propose an efficient countermeasure.