On Security Analysis of Recent Password Authentication and Key Agreement Schemes Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Secure and efficient mutual authentication and key agreement schemes form the basis for any robust network communication system. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has emerged as one of the most successful Public Key Cryptosystem that efficiently meets all the security challenges. Comparison of ECC with other Public Key Cryptosystems (RSA, Rabin, ElGamal) shows that it provides equal level of security for a far smaller bit size, thereby substantially reducing the processing overhead. This makes it suitable for constrained environments like wireless networks and mobile devices as well as for security sensitive applications like electronic banking, financial transactions and smart grids. With the successful implementation of ECC in security applications (e-passports, e-IDs, embedded systems), it is getting widely commercialized. ECC is simple and faster and is therefore emerging as an attractive alternative for providing security in lightweight device, which contributes to its popularity in the present scenario. In this paper, we have analyzed some of the recent password based authentication and key agreement schemes using ECC for various environments. Furthermore, we have carried out security, functionality and performance comparisons of these schemes and found that they are unable to satisfy their claimed security goals.