Multi-party password-authenticated key exchange scheme with privacy preservation for mobile environment

Abstract

Communications among multi-party must be fast, cost effective and secure. Today’s computing environments such as internet conference, multi-user games and many more applications involve multi-party. All participants together establish a common session key to enable multi-party and secure exchange of messages. Multi-party password-based authenticated key exchange scheme allows users to communicate securely over an insecure network by using easy-to-remember password. Kwon et al. proposed a practical three-party password-based authenticated key exchange (3-PAKE) scheme to allow two users to establish a session key through a server without pre-sharing a password between users. However, Kwon et al.'s scheme cannot meet the security requirements of key authentication, key confirmation and anonymity. In this paper, we present a novel, simple and efficient multi-party password-based authenticated key exchange (M-PAKE) scheme based on the elliptic curve cryptography for mobile environment. Our proposed scheme only requires two round-messages. Furthermore, the proposed scheme not only satisfies security requirements for PAKE scheme but also achieves efficient computation and communication.