Fortifying key negotiation schemes with poorly chosen passwords

Abstract

Key exchange schemes such as Diffie Heilman are vulnerable to middleperson attacks, and thus are often augmented by means of shared secrets. Where these secrets must be memorised, they will usually be vulnerable to guessing attacks. The authors show how collision-rich hash functions can be used to detect such attacks while they are in progress and thus frustrate them. © 1994, IEE. All rights reserved.