RFC 5683

"Password-Authenticated Key (PAK) Diffie-Hellman Exchange", February 2010

Canonical URL:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5683.txt
This document is also available in this non-normative format: PDF.

Status:

INFORMATIONAL

Authors:

A. Brusilovsky
I. Faynberg
Z. Zeltsan
S. Patel

Stream:

INDEPENDENT

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Abstract

This document proposes to add mutual authentication, based on a human-memorizable password, to the basic, unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange. The proposed algorithm is called the Password-Authenticated Key (PAK) exchange. PAK allows two parties to authenticate themselves while performing the Diffie-Hellman exchange. The protocol is secure against all passive and active attacks. In particular, it does not allow either type of attacker to obtain any information that would enable an offline dictionary attack on the password. PAK provides Forward Secrecy. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

For the definition of Stream, see RFC 4844.