Round-Optimal Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange

We show a general framework for constructing password-based authenticated key-exchange protocols with optimal round complexity—one message per party, sent simultaneously—in the standard model, assuming the existence of a common reference string. When our framework is instantiated using bilinear-map-based cryptosystems, the resulting protocol is also (reasonably) efficient. Somewhat surprisingly, our framework can be adapted to give protocols in the standard model that are universally composable while still using only one (simultaneous) round.