Cryptanalysis and improvement of a chaotic map-based key agreement protocol using Chebyshev sequence membership testing

Abstract

Recently, Gong et al. (Nonlinear Dyn, doi:10.1007/s11071-012-0628-3, 2012) proposed a chaotic map-based key agreement protocol without using smart cards. They claimed that the protocol is secure against password-guessing attacks. However, we show that Gong et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to partition attacks, whereby the adversary can guess the correct password off-line. We also demonstrate that the protocol suffers from a a stolen-verifier attack along with password change pitfalls. Thereafter, we proposed an chaotic map-based key agreement protocol without using smart cards to conquer the mentioned weaknesses. The security analysis of the proposed protocol shows that it is suitable for the applications with higher security requirement.