International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We present a secure two-factor authentication (TFA) scheme based on the possession by the user of a password and a crypto-capable device. Security is “end-to-end” in the sense that the attacker can attack all parts of the system, including all communication links and any subset of parties (servers, devices, client terminals), can learn users’ passwords, and perform active and passive attacks, online and offline. In all cases the scheme provides the highest attainable security bounds given the set of compromised components. Our solution builds a TFA scheme using any Device-Enhanced PAKE, defined by Jarecki et al., and any Short Authenticated String (SAS) Message Authentication, defined by Vaudenay. We show an efficient instantiation the modular, generic construction we give is not PAKE-agnostic because it doesn’t even use PAKE, but the instantiation of this scheme which instantiates DE-PAKE with PTR+PAKE is PAKE-agnostic as you say of this modular construction which utilizes any password-based client-server authentication method, with or without reliance on public-key infrastructure. The security of the proposed scheme is proven in a formal model that we formulate as an extension of the traditional PAKE model.We also report on a prototype implementation of our schemes, including TLS-based and PKI-free variants, as well as several instantiations of the SAS mechanism, all demonstrating the practicality of our approach.