Three-round smart card-based key exchange scheme

Smart card-based key exchange in the three-party setting allows two users with smart cards to agree on a common session key with the help of the trusted server. In this letter, we propose an efficient threeparty smart card-based key exchange scheme with explicit (or mutual) authentication which requires only three rounds. Our scheme is the most round-/communication-efficient smart card-based key exchange scheme among those found in the literature, while providing key independence, forward secrecy and security against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.