is honest, vulnerabilities on a system can also cause
a problem such as Heartbleed in April 2014. In
fact, the vulnerability of OpenSSL can cause a prob-
lem that the passwords stored in servers are leaked.
ENISA pointed out that an adversary can potentially
obtain the passwords of all users without authentica-
tion (ENISA, 2014). PAKE cannot defend against
such a threat because a single trusted authentication
server stores all the passwords.
Abdalla et al. (Abdalla et al., 2005; Abdalla et
al., 2008) proposed schemes to solve those problems.
Gateway PAKE (GPAKE) is a scheme addressing the
first problem and Gateway Threshold PAKE (GT-
PAKE) is a scheme addressing both problems. How-
ever, their schemes are vulnerable to Undetectable
On-line Dictionary Attack (UDonDA) (Ding et al.,
1995), where an adversary guesses a password in on-
line transaction and its password guessing attack is
not detected by any authentication server. In (Ab-
dalla et al., 2008), it is mentioned that the scheme
can be modified such that the authentication server
can detect on-line dictionary attacks, but the details of
the modification and its security proof are not given.
In their schemes, an authentication server returns a
message without authenticating users, so the adver-
sary can make unlimited attempts to guess a pass-
word. Due to the low entropy of the password, such a
password guessing attack becomes a serious problem.
Therefore, it is necessary to propose a new scheme
that overcomes UDonDA.
1.2 Contribution
We propose new GTPAKE which has resistance
of UDonDA and the corruption of authentication
servers. We prove the security of our GTPAKE
under standard assumptions in the random oracle
model. The proposed scheme has the stronger secu-
rity against a malicious provider compared with ex-
isting schemes, and a global roaming service used
for users regardless of places and devices is expected
as an application. Our scheme is an instantiation of
GTPAKE, and the generalization of GPAKE and GT-
PAKE is left as future work.
A naive extension of GPAKE does not lead to
GTPAKE with the property described in Section 1.1.
The reason is as follows: If one authentication server
holds plain passwords as in GPAKE, the server can
just compare the received password with the corre-
sponding plain password. However, as stored pass-
words should be hidden from authentication servers
in GTPAKE, the authentication servers cannot eas-
ily verify logins of users. To overcome this prob-
lem, we encrypt the stored passwords by a public
key of the authentication servers where the corre-
sponding secret key is shared among the authentica-
tion servers. Furthermore, in the authentication pro-
cess, the servers decrypt the encrypted password par-
tially and authenticate a user simultaneously without
revealing the password itself.
We compare the proposed scheme with other ex-
isting GPAKE and GTPAKE schemes.
2
As shown in
Table 1, the computation and communication costs
of our protocol are not better than those of GT-
PAKE (Abdalla et al., 2005). However, their secu-
rity proof reduces to the non-standard assumptions
such as the Password-based Chosen-basis Decisional
Diffie-Hellman (PCDDH) assumption, which is vul-
nerable to some attacks (Szydlo, 2006). Even if those
flawed assumptions hold, their scheme is vulnerable
to UDonDA, which is out of security model. The se-
curity of our scheme is proven in the random oracle
model if the DDH assumption holds. Our scheme tol-
erates the corruption of some authentication servers
as their scheme. Furthermore, while their scheme is
vulnerable to UDonDA, our scheme is invulnerable to
this attack, although our proof similar to (Wei et al.,
2011) is given in the non-concurrent setting, which
assumes that a new session does not begin until the
previous session is finished.
The organization of the paper is as follows: In
Section 2, we introduce some background to under-
stand this paper. In Section 3, we define the security
model of GTPAKE. In Section 4, we describe the con-
struction of our scheme. In Section 5, we prove the
security of the proposed scheme. Finally we make
final remarks in Section 6.
2 PRELIMINARIES
We show the notation and the security assumption
used in this paper.
Notation. We use the following notations through-
out this paper. We denote by Z
q
a set {0,1,...,q−1}.
x ← A represents that x is chosen uniformly at random
from a set A. Let g be a generator of subgroup G of
order p over Z
q
and a k b be a concatenation of el-
ements a and b, which is able to be divided into the
original elements. We denote by {0,1}
k
a set of all
binary strings of length k. Especially, {0,1}
∗
means a
set of all binary strings of arbitrary length. A function
negl is negligible if and only if for every positive inte-
2
In the comparison here, we focus only on the schemes
with security proofs, and the discussion about the schemes
without security proofs can be found in (Wei et al., 2011).
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