Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The internet has grown greatly in the past decade, by some numbers exceeding 47 million active web sites and a total aggregate exceeding 100 million web sites. What is common practice today on the Internet is that servers have public keys, but clients are largely authenticated via short passwords. Protecting these passwords by not storing them in the clear on institutions's servers has become a priority. This paper develops password-based ciphersuites for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that are: (1) resistant to server compromise; (2) provably secure; (3) believed to be free from patent and licensing restrictions based on an analysis of relevant patents in the area.