Password Authenticated Key Exchange Variants for Practical Password Security

Password authentication is common in the digital world, yet current methods rely completely on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and server trust to establish security. A promising solution to this problem is Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE), a cryptographic primitive in which two parties who share a password establish a cryptographic key. This dissertation is a collection of three articles which all center on creating and analyzing PAKE variants in the strong Universally Composable model that solve real-world problems efficiently enough to be adopted in practice. The articles are entitled “Password Authenticated Public Key Encryption,” [27] “Strong Asymmetric PAKE based on Trapdoor CKEM,” [28] and “Universally Composable Relaxed Password Authenticated Key Exchange” [2]