Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search

Open Access padlockePrints

The Newcastle University research output collection, currently available on ePrints, will shortly be moving to a new open repository platform, Figshare. To prepare for the data migration we have paused adding new content to ePrints, and will resume once the new repository is launched. During this time you will continue to have access to ePrints (but no new content will appear). We will share updates here when available.

How to Sync with Alice

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Feng Hao, Professor Peter Ryan

Downloads

Licence

This is the final published version of a report that has been published in its final definitive form by School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2011.

For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.

Abstract

This paper explains the sync problem and compares solutions in Firefox 4 and Chrome 10. The sync problem studies how to securely synchronize data across different computers. Google has added a built-in sync function in Chrome 10, which uses a user-defined password to encrypt bookmarks, history, cached passwords etc. However, due to the low-entropy of passwords, the encryption is inherently weak -- anyone with access to the ciphertext can easily uncover the key (and hence disclose the plaintext). Mozilla used to have a very similar sync solution in Firefox 3.5, but since Firefox 4 it has made a complete change of how sync works in the browser. The new solution is based on a security protocol called J-PAKE, which is a balanced Password Authenticated Key Exchange(PAKE) protocol. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale deployment of the PAKE technology. Since PAKE does not require a PKI, it has compelling advantages than PKI-based schemes such as SSL/TLS in many applications. However, in the past decade, deploying PAKE has been greatly hampered by the patent and other issues. With the rise of patent-free solutions such as J-PAKE and also that the EKE patent will soon expire in October, 2011, we believe the PAKE technology will be more widely adopted in the near future.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Hao F, Ryan PYA

Publication type: Report

Publication status: Published

Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series

Year: 2011

Pages: 12

Print publication date: 01/06/2011

Source Publication Date: June 2011

Report Number: 1260

Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne

Share