Universally Composable Relaxed Password Authenticated Key Exchange

Abstract

Protocols for password authenticated key exchange (PAKE) allow two parties who share only a weak password to agree on a cryptographic key. We revisit the notion of PAKE in the universal composability (UC) framework, and propose a relaxation of the PAKE functionality of Canetti et al. that we call lazy-extraction PAKE (lePAKE). Our relaxation allows the ideal-world adversary to postpone its password guess until after a session is complete. We argue that this relaxed notion still provides meaningful security in the password-only setting. As our main result, we show that several PAKE protocols that were previously only proven secure with respect to a “game-based” definition of security can be shown to UC-realize the lePAKE functionality in the random-oracle model. These include SPEKE, SPAKE2, and TBPEKE, the most efficient PAKE schemes currently known. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2020.