Weakness Analysis and Improvement of a Gateway-Oriented Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol

Abstract: Recently, Abdalla et al. proposed a new gateway-oriented password-based authenticated key exchange (GPAKE) protocol among a client, a gateway, and an authentication server, where each client shares a human-memorable password with a trusted server so that they can resort to the server for authentication when want to establish a shared session key with the gateway. In the letter, we show that a malicious client of GPAKE is still able to gain information of password by performing an undetectable on-line password guessing attack and can not provide the implicit key confirmation. At last, we present a countermeasure to against the attack.