Hi Hugo,

Thanks for your comments.

Just to clarify the difference between SPAKE2 and J-PAKE - The proof of SPAKE2 
depends on the assumption of a trusted setup: the discrete logarithm between 
the two group generators must be unknown by anyone. If a powerful adversary (3 
letter agency) gathers sufficient resources and time (say 1 year) to break one 
instance of discrete logarithm, it will be a class attack, breaking all 
instances of SPAKE2 without anyone knowing it. By contrast, they can only break 
one session in J-PAKE, since by design the randomness is refreshed in every 
session rather than being built into a static setup. This explain why J-PAKE 
requires more computation than SPAKE2. Hope it clarifies..

Regards,
Feng

From: TLS <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of Hugo 
Krawczyk <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Wednesday, 27 March 2019 at 02:49
To: Hannes Tschofenig 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Cc: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Subject: Re: [TLS] Elliptic Curve J-PAKE

Hi Hannes,

J-PAKE is a symmetric PAKE. Both parties store the same password. It is not 
suitable for most client-server scenarios where using J-PAKE would mean that an 
attacker that breaks into the server simply steals all plaintext passwords. 
OPAQUE is an asymmetric (or augmented) PAKE where user remembers a password 
(and nothing else, including no public key of the server) while the server 
stores a one-way image of the password. Security requires that if the server is 
compromised, the attacker needs to run an offline dictionary attack for each 
user in the database to find the password.

If what you need is a symmetric PAKE then there are better candidates than 
J-PAKE such as SPAKE2 described in draft-irtf-cfrg-spake2-08. SPAKE2 is *much* 
more efficient than J-PAKE and while both J-PAKE and SPAKE2 have proofs of 
security, SPAKE2 is proven in a stronger security model relative to J-PAKE.

I am not aware of any advantage of J-PAKE over SPAKE2 - but I may be missing 
something. Maybe the PAKE presentation in cfrg will clarify these issues 
further.

Hugo



On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 1:03 PM Hannes Tschofenig 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi all,

in context of the OPAQUE talk by Nick today at the TLS WG meeting I mentioned 
that the Thread Group has used the Elliptic Curve J-PAKE for IoT device 
onboarding.
Here is the draft written for TLS 1.2:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cragie-tls-ecjpake-01

The mechanism is described in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8236

@Nick & Richard: Have a look at it and see whether it fits your needs.

Ciao
Hannes

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