Secure Password-Based Cipher Suite for TLS

SSL is the de facto standard today for securing endto -end transport. While the protocol seems rather secure there are a number of risks which lurk in its use, e.g., in web banking. We motivate the use of passwordbased key exchange protocols by showing how they overcome some of these problems. We propose the integration of such a protocol (DH-EKE) in the TLS protocol, the standardization of SSL by IETF. The resulting protocol provides secure mutual authentication and key establishment over an insecure channel. It does not have to resort to a PKI or keys and certificates stored on the users computer. Additionaly the integration in TLS is as minimal and non-intrusive as possible. As a side-effect we also improve DH-EKE to provide semantic security assuming the hardness of the Decisional Diffie-Hellman Problem. 1. Introduction The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol [15] is todays de facto standard for securing end-to-end transport over the Internet. In particular the presence of SSL in ..