Some remarks on protecting weak keys and poorly-chosen secrets from guessing attacks

Abstract

Authentication and key distribution protocols that utilize weak secrets (such as passwords and personal identification numbers) are traditionally susceptible to guessing attacks whereby an adversary iterates through a relatively small key space and verifies the correct guess. Such attacks can be defeated by the use of public key encryption and careful protocol construction. T. Lomas et al. (Proc. of ACM Symp. on Operating Syst. Principles, 1989) investigated this topic and developed a methodology for avoiding guessing attacks while incurring only moderate overhead. Several issues concerning the proposed solution are discussed here, and modifications that remove some of the constraints (such as synchronized time and state retention by the server) and result in simpler and more efficient protocols are suggested.