Hi, One thing we could discuss is Elliptic Curve PAKEs (Password Authenticated Key Exchange).
There's some ideas worth exploring due to expiry of Lucent patents; developments such as SPAKE2, J-PAKE, and AugPAKE; and "hashing to curve" algorithms like SWU and Elligator [1,2]. For example, Mike Hamburg's ideas in [3] seem promising. But are there good use cases to focus discussion? Possibilities - * PAKE for the web has been attempted in TLS (RFC 5054) with little interest from browsers or sites. Partly this is a layering problem (username in clear, too early in the connection, and the TLS terminator is the wrong place for client auth). But there are deeper UI problems: browsers would have to display an unspoofable dialog; users would have to be trained to enter certain passwords only into this dialog; and sites would lose control of login UI. Client auth for the web seems likely to evolve in other directions (e.g. password managers, 2-factor, federation). * SSH already has J-PAKE which (I think?) is rarely used, though I'm not sure why. If part of the reason is performance, is there room for improvement here? * IEEE 802.11s I think has standardized on "Simultaneous Authentication of Equals" (aka Dragonfly) as an EC PAKE. I don't know if it's seen real deployment, nor do I understand the "mesh networking" scenario it's being used for, which seems different from just authenticating a client to an AP. Anyone know more? * There are smaller, more specialized uses of PAKE for protocols like online backups or device pairing. E.g. I think Chrome is (using? investigating?) SPAKE2 for "chromoting", whatever that is. Anyways, it's not clear that there are strong-enough use cases to motivate a good discussion and keep it on track. Though I wish there were! PAKEs are cool, it seems like they should be useful somewhere. Other thoughts? Trevor [1] http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/340.pdf [2] http://elligator.cr.yp.to [3] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03840.html
_______________________________________________ Curves mailing list [email protected] https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/curves
