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SUMMARY Three-party password-authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocols allow entities to negotiate a secret session key with the aid of a trusted server with whom they share a human-memorable password. Recently, Lou and Huang proposed a simple 3PAKE protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography, which is claimed to be secure and to provide superior efficiency when compared with similar-purpose solutions. In this paper, however, we show that the solution is vulnerable to key-compromise impersonation and offline password guessing attacks from system insiders or outsiders, which indicates that the empirical approach used to evaluate the scheme's security is flawed. These results highlight the need of employing provable security approaches when designing and analyzing PAKE schemes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, Huang ( Int. J. Commun. Syst., 22, 857-862) proposed a simple and efficient three-party password-based key exchange protocol without server's public key. This work shows that the protocol could be vulnerable to an undetectable online password guessing attack. Furthermore, an improved protocol is proposed to avoid the attack. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]