On the Security of a New C2C-PAKA Protocol ⁄
Jin Wook Byun · Information Security and Cryptology · 2012
To achieve an entire end-to-end security, the classical authentication setting such that all participants have a same password is not practical since a password is not a common secret but a personal secret depending on an individual. Thus, an efficient client to client different password-based authenticated key agreement protocol (for short, EC2C-PAKA) has been suggested in the cross-realm setting. Very recently, however, a security weakness of the EC2C-PAKA protocol has been analyzed by Feng and Xu. They have claimed that the EC2C-PAKA protocol is insecure against a password impersonation attack. They also have presented an improved version of the EC2C-PAKA protocol. In this paper, we demonstrate that their claim on the insecurity of EC2C-PAKA protocol against a password impersonation attack is not valid. We show that the EC2C-PAKA protocol is still secure against the password impersonation attack. In addition, ironically, we show that the improved protocol by Feng and Xu is insecure against an impersonation attack such that a server holding password of Alice in realm A can impersonate Bob in realm B. We also discuss a countermeasure to prevent the attack.