Comparison of PAKE protocols for web authentication

This project aims to compare the performance of two Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocols for web authentication. The first is OPAQUE which is provided by the @cloudflare/opaque-ts TypeScript library. The second is Owl, a new PAKE protocol which this project aims to implement in TypeScript. The Owl code is in a separate repository. An express.js app will be used to demonstrate the protocols.

Install

To clone the repository with owl-ts, run

git clone --recursive https://github.com/henry50/3rd-year-project.git

If you have already cloned the repository, run

git submodule update --init --recursive

to install owl-ts.

Build

These commands assume your current directory is the root of the repository.

To build the demo, run

cd owl-ts
npm install
npm run build

cd ../demo
npm install
npm run build

Configuration

The demonstration needs several environment variables to be set. The easiest way to set these is using a .env file.

# These are required by both protocols
DATABASE_URI=sqlite:demo.db
PORT=3000
SERVER_IDENTITY="localhost"

# These are required by OPAQUE
OPRF_SEED="..."
SERVER_AKE_PUBLIC_KEY="..."
SERVER_AKE_PRIVATE_KEY="..."

To generate a .env file with a random OPRF seed and AKE keypair, you can use the generate_env.ts file. If you have chosen a different OPAQUE config for the client and server, edit generate_env.ts to match.

To avoid accidentally overwriting an existing .env file, the script will not work if a .env file already exists. To generate a new .env file, run

cd demo
npx tsx generate_env.ts

Run

Once configured, the demo can be run with

cd demo
npm run start

By default it will start on localhost:3000.

To run the benchmark, run

cd demo
npm run benchmark