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Cryptography and Expanded Password System


Prof. Hideki Imai, who pushed my back to move ahead confidently in 2001 when he was the chair of Japan’s CRYPTREC, used to emphasize repeatedly how critical it is to get the credential data hashed whether online or offline. It is from him that I learnt about Deffie-Hellman Key Exchange, Elliptic Curve Cryptography, etc.

We jointly tried the methodology of using the high-entropy credential data generated by Expanded Password System (EPS) as the seed of RSA key pair; the user's private key does not physically exist anywhere in the universe, but it can be re-generated in-the-fly out of the images that the user picks up for authentication for each login. It proved to work on the internet.

Thereafter, we took up the experiment of incorporating EPS into PAKE.  We were able to demonstrate that it worked with no friction in the lab environment.

These projects, sponsored by government agencies, were completed in 2003 – 2004.  In retrospect, we seem to have started these forward-looking projects a bit too early.

Cryptography helps EPS, and EPS helps Cryptography.

Click the link for more - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/summary-brief-history-expanded-password-system-hitoshi-kokumai


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