Provably secure three-party password authenticated key exchange protocol in the standard model

Three-party password authenticated key exchange protocol is a very practical mechanism to establish secure session key through authenticating each other with the help of a trusted server. Most three-party password authenticated key exchange protocols only guarantee security in the random oracle model. However, a random oracle based cryptographic construction may be insecure when the oracle is replaced by real function. Moreover, some previous unknown attacks appear with the advance of the adversary capability. Therefore, a suitable standard model which can imitate a wider variety of attack scenarios for 3PAKE protocol is needed. Aim at resisting dictionary attack, unknown key-share attack and password-compromise impersonation attack, an expanded standard model for 3PAKE protocol is given. Meanwhile, through applying EIGamal encryption scheme and pseudorandom function, a specific three-party password authenticated key exchange protocol is proposed. The security of the proposed protocol is proven in the new standard model. The result shows that the present protocol has stronger security by comparing with other existing protocols, which covers the following security properties: (1) semantic security, (2) key privacy, (3) client-to-server authentication, (4) mutual authentication, (5) resistance to various known attacks, and (6) forward security. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.