Public-Key Cryptography and Password Protocols: The Multi-User Case.
Maurizio Kliban Boyarsky · 1999
The problem of password authentication over an insecure network when the user holds only a human-memorizable password has received much attention in the literature. The first rigorous treatment was provided by Halevi and Krawczyk, who studied off-line password guessing attacks in the scenario in which the authentication server possesses a pair of private and public keys. In this work we: ffl Show the inadequacy of both the HK formalization and protocol in the case where there is more than a single user: using a simple and realistic attack, we prove failure of the HK solution in the two-user case. ffl Propose a new definition of security for the multiuser case, expressed in terms of transcripts of the entire system, rather than individual protocol executions. ffl Suggest several ways of achieving this security against both static and dynamic adversaries. In a recent revision of their paper, Halevi and Krawczyk again attempted to handle the multi-user case. We expose a weakness in their revised definition. 1