After attending ISO/IEC SC 27 WG2 for 4 years, I’m happy to say that J-PAKE is finally published in ISO/IEC 11770-4 (2017) as an international standard. In the mean time, J-PAKE is also published in RFC 8236 by IETF (together with an accompanying RFC 8235 on Schnorr non-interactive zero-knowledge proof). This is a milestone for J-PAKE. From the first presentation at Security Protocol Worksop ’08 in Cambridge to the publication in the international standard in 2017, J-PAKE has come a long way. The critical insight in the design of J-PAKE was based on understanding the importance of zero knowledge proof (ZKP), but this insight was not shared by other researchers in the field at the time. One main reason is that the use of ZKP was considered incompatible with the then-universally-adopted formal models in the PAKE field. However, in an independent study due to Abdalla, Benhamouda, MacKenzie and published in IEEE S&P 2015, the formal model for PAKE protocols was modified to make it compatible with ZKP, and the modified model was applied to prove J-PAKE was secure. The provable results are the same as in the original J-PAKE paper, but are constructed in a formal model, thus bridging the gap between theory and practice in the end.

Today, J-PAKE has already been used by many million users in commercial products, e.g., Palemoon Sync, Google Nest, ARM mbed OS, OpenSSL, Mozilla NSS, and Bouncycastle API. In particular, J-PAKE has been adopted by the Thread Group as a standard key exchange mechanism for the IoT commissioning process, i.e., adding new IoT devices to an existing network. The protocol has already been embedded into IoT products. The following video demonstrates how J-PAKE is used to securely enrol a new IoT device into the Thread network during the commissioning process (more details about Thread can be found at NXP, Thread Group, ARM, Silicon Labs and Google Nest’s Open Thread). It’s expected that in the near future, J-PAKE will be used by many billion Thread-compliant IoT devices for the initial bootstrapping of trust.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?cid=social58659186&adbid=10154059817626414&adbpr=172907906413&v=X7cVBjMIp04&adbpl=fb&app=desktop

The J-PAKE key exchange protocol, designed by Prof Peter Ryan and myself in 2008, has been built into the Nest thermostat products (Nest was bought by Google in 2014 for US$3.2 billion). A technical white paper that describes the implementation has recently gone public (13 July, 2015).

Besides the Google Nest, J-PAKE has also been used in other commercial products. Since 2010, J-PAKE has been used by Mozilla Firefox to implement secure sync and deployed to over 400 million internet users. Recently, Mozilla Firefox starts to deploy a different mechanism (less secure but more usable than J-PAKE) for sync. However, the Palemoon browser, a popular fork of Firefox, retains the original J-PAKE based mechanism for preserving full security in protecting sync data (which contain sensitive user passwords). In the ISO/IEC SC 27 meeting held in Mexico City in October 2014, it was unanimously supported by national bodies in Work Group 2 to include J-PAKE into the ISO/IEC 11770-4 standard. The standardization of J-PAKE is currently in process and expects to finish in another two years.

The original J-PAKE paper was initially rejected by major conferences in the field, as the protocol design was based on a new method and didn’t follow any established approaches in the main stream at the time. The paper was eventually accepted and published by a small workshop (Security Protocols Workshop’08) held locally in Cambridge, UK in 2008. After 7 years of test by time, it is pleasing to see that the J-PAKE technique and its basic design ideas are being gradually accepted by the academic community and the industry.