An Offline Dictionary Attack against zkPAKE Protocol

Jose Becerra; Peter Y. A.  Ryan; Petra Sala; Marjan Skrobot

Paper 2017/961

An Offline Dictionary Attack against zkPAKE Protocol

Jose Becerra, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Petra Sala, and Marjan Skrobot

Abstract

Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) allows a user to establish a strong cryptographic key with a server, using only knowledge of a pre-shared password. One of the basic security requirements of PAKE is to prevent offline dictionary attacks. In this paper, we revisit zkPAKE, an augmented PAKE that has been recently proposed by Mochetti, Resende, and Aranha (SBSeg 2015). Our work shows that the zkPAKE protocol is prone to offline password guessing attack, even in the presence of an adversary that has only eavesdropping capabilities. Therefore, zkPAKE is insecure and should not be used as a key exchange mechanism.

Note: Implementation of the attack added to old version

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: PAKE
Contact author(s): petra sala @ uni lu
History: 2019-04-15: revised; 2017-09-30: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2017/961
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/961,
      author = {Jose Becerra and Peter Y. A.  Ryan and Petra Sala and Marjan Skrobot},
      title = {An Offline Dictionary Attack against {zkPAKE} Protocol},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2017/961},
      year = {2017},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/961}
}