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International Conference on Information Security

ISC 2017: Information Security pp 92–113Cite as

Zero-Knowledge Password Policy Check from Lattices

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10599))

Abstract

Passwords are ubiquitous and most commonly used to authenticate users when logging into online services. Using high entropy passwords is critical to prevent unauthorized access and password policies emerged to enforce this requirement on passwords. However, with current methods of password storage, poor practices and server breaches have leaked many passwords to the public. To protect one’s sensitive information in case of such events, passwords should be hidden from servers. Verifier-based password authenticated key exchange, proposed by Bellovin and Merrit (IEEE S&P, 1992), allows authenticated secure channels to be established with a hash of a password (verifier). Unfortunately, this restricts password policies as passwords cannot be checked from their verifier. To address this issue, Kiefer and Manulis (ESORICS 2014) proposed zero-knowledge password policy check (ZKPPC). A ZKPPC protocol allows users to prove in zero knowledge that a hash of the user’s password satisfies the password policy required by the server. Unfortunately, their proposal is not quantum resistant with the use of discrete logarithm-based cryptographic tools and there are currently no other viable alternatives. In this work, we construct the first post-quantum ZKPPC using lattice-based tools. To this end, we introduce a new randomised password hashing scheme for ASCII-based passwords and design an accompanying zero-knowledge protocol for policy compliance. Interestingly, our proposal does not follow the framework established by Kiefer and Manulis and offers an alternate construction without homomorphic commitments. Although our protocol is not ready to be used in practice, we think it is an important first step towards a quantum-resistant privacy-preserving password-based authentication and key exchange system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This hides the actual length t of the password in the ZKPPC protocol in Sect. 3.4.

  2. 2.

    The construction we present considers the scenario where \(k_D, k_S, k_L, k_U\) are all positive. Our scheme can be easily adjusted to handle the case where one or more of them are 0.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of ISC 2017 for helpful comments. The research is supported by Singapore Ministry of Education under Research Grant MOE2016-T2-2-014(S) and by NTU under Tier 1 grant RG143/14.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Mathematical Sciences, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Khoa Nguyen, Benjamin Hong Meng Tan & Huaxiong Wang

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  1. Khoa Nguyen
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Correspondence to Benjamin Hong Meng Tan .

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  1. Inria, Tokyo, Japan

    Phong Q. Nguyen

  2. Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore

    Jianying Zhou

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Nguyen, K., Tan, B.H.M., Wang, H. (2017). Zero-Knowledge Password Policy Check from Lattices. In: Nguyen, P., Zhou, J. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10599. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69659-1_6

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