An efficient client-client password-based authentication scheme with provable security

Recently, Tso proposed a three-party password-based authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocol. This protocol allows two clients to authenticate each other and establish a secure session key through a server over an insecure channel. The main security goals of such protocols are authentication and privacy. However, we show that Tso's protocol achieves neither authentication goal nor privacy goal. In this paper, we indicate that the privacy and authentication goals of Tso's protocol will be broken by off-line password guessing attack and impersonation attack, respectively. To overcome the weaknesses, we propose an improved 3PAKE protocol to achieve more security and performance than related protocols. The security of the proposed improved protocol is proved in random oracle model.