Efficient Multi-Factor Authenticated Key Exchange Scheme for Mobile Communications

Abstract

Authenticated key exchange (AKE) is one of the most important applications in applied cryptography, where a user interacts with a server to set up a session key where pre-registered information (aka. authentication factor), such as a password or biometrics, of the user is stored. While single-factor AKE is widely used in practice, higher security concerns call for multi-factor AKE (MFAKE) schemes, e.g., combining both passwords and biometrics simultaneously. However, in some casually designed schemes, security is even weakened in the sense that leakage of one authentication factor will defeat the whole MFAKE protocol. Furthermore, an inevitable by-product arise that the usability of the protocol often drop greatly. To summarize, the existing multi-factor protocols did not provide enough security and efficiency simultaneously. In this paper, we make one step ahead by proposing a very efficient MFAKE protocol. We define the security model and give the according security analysis. We also implement our protocol on a smartphone and a cloud server. The theoretic comparisons and the experimental results show that our scheme achieves both security and usability.