Simple three-party key exchange protocol

Three-party authenticated key exchange protocol is an important cryptographic technique in the secure communication areas, by which two clients, each shares a human-memorable password with a trusted server, can agree a secure session key. Over the past years, many three-party authenticated key exchange protocols have been proposed. However, to our best knowledge, not all of them can meet the requirements of security and efficiency simultaneously. Therefore, in this paper, we would like to propose a new simple three-party password based authenticated key exchange protocol. Compared with other existing protocols, our proposed protocol does not require any server's public key, but can resist against various known attacks. Therefore, we believe it is suitable for some practical scenarios. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.