Challenge-response passwords (Was: big word listing)

[stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)]

At 06:59 PM 7/25/95 +0100, Andrew Spring wrote:
>Free-after-1997 example:
>        g is a generator of a prime p.
>        password is X (0<X<p);
>        password file has g^X mod p.
>        login server generates Y, issues challenge g^Y.
>        expected response is g^XY mod p
>        login client has X, generates (g^Y)^X = g^XY mod p.
>        J. Random SuperHacker can get g^X, and g^Y, but not g^XY.

It's _not_ free after 1997!  I thought of it last fall, was surprised I couldn't
find it anywhere in the literature, given that it's pretty obvious,
but eventually found that a guy from Siemens had patented it in Germany
and then gotten a US patent in ~1994.  Unfortunately, he phrased it in terms of
"commutative hash functions", with g^X mod p as an example, so it's more
general.
He also extended it to do two-way authentication (obviously the process can be
symmetrical if the user has a stored g^W from the server and can send a
challenge,
but he found a way to save a step or two.)

I developed it because I was looking for a way to do authentication-only
public key stuff so the code would be exportable - this approach doesn't
generate a shared secret (since the otherwise-secret g^XT is exposed
as the response to the challenge.)  However, it's possible to extend it to
preserve the shared secret - instead of sending response g^XY mod p, send
        Hash(g^XY mod p)
and have the login server validate that.  One advantage is that the hash
can be much shorter than the whole g^XY mod p, e.g. 32-64 bits instead of
512-1024.

And you can now use (g^XY mod p) as a session key (for encrypted sessions)
or an authenticator (e.g. send Hash(Data,sequence#,sessionkey) as a MAC for
each packet.
#---
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
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