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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Feng Hao, Dr Siamak Fayyaz Shahandashti
The SPEKE protocol is commonly considered one of the classic Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) schemes. It has been included in international standards (particularly, ISO/IEC 11770-4 and IEEE 1363.2) and deployed in commercial products (e.g., Blackberry). We observe that the original SPEKE specification is subtly different from those defined in the ISO/IEC 11770-4 and IEEE 1363.2 standards. We show that those differences have critical security implications by presenting two new attacks on SPEKE: an impersonation attack and a key-malleability attack. The first attack allows an attacker to impersonate a user without knowing the password by engaging in two parallel sessions with the victim. The second attack allows an attacker to manipulate the session key established between two honest users without being detected. Both attacks are applicable to the original SPEKE scheme, and are only partially addressed in the ISO/IEC 11770-4 and IEEE 1363.2 standards. We highlight deficiencies in both standards and suggest concrete changes.
Author(s): Hao F, Shahandashti SF
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2014
Pages: 13
Print publication date: 01/09/2014
Report Number: 1434
Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/1434.pdf
