• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.33-42
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• 2002

We present a systematic way to armor a zero-knowledge interactive proof based identification scheme that has badly chosen keys. Keys are sometimes mistakenly chosen to be weak(neither random nor long), and a weak key is often preferred to a strong key so that it might be easy for human to remember. Weak keys severely degrade the security of ZKIP based identification schemes. We show using off-line guessing attack how the weak key threats the security of ZlKIP based identification schemes. For the proper usage of ZKIP, we introduce a specialized form of ZKIP, which has a secret coin-tossing stage. Using the secret coin tossing, a secure framework is proposed for ZKIP based identification schemes with weak key in the ideal cipher model. The framework is very useful in password based authentication and key exchange protocol