Designing secure key exchange protocols

Colin Boyd, Wenbo Mao

Hao-Hsien Bobby Wang

The importance of an authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol has long been known in the field of cryptography. Two of the questions still being asked today are (1) what properties or features does a secure AKE protocol possess, and (2) How does one, in a step by step fashion, create a secure AKE protocol? This thesis aims to answer these two questions. \nThe thesis contains two parts: one is a survey of previous works on the desired features of the Station-to-Station (STS) protocol, and the other is a study of a previously proposed design methodology in designing secure AKE protocols, as well as contributing an original idea of such methodologies. Descriptions and comparisons of the two design methodologies are included. \nThe thesis surveys the literature and conducts a case study of the STS protocol, analyzes various attacks on STS through some known attacks to it, and extracts the desired properties and features of a secure AKE protocol via the case study. This part of the thesis does not propose any new result, but summarizes a complete list of issues one should take consideration of while designing an AKE protocol. We also show that at the end of this part, a secure version of STS which possesses the desired features of an AKE protocol. \nThe other major part of the thesis surveys one design methodology of creating a secure AKE protocol by Bellare, Canetti, and Krawczyk; it is based on having a secure key exchange protocol then adding (mutual) authentication to it. The thesis then proposes another original design methodology; it starts with a secure mutual authentication protocol, then adds the secure key exchange feature without modifying overheads and number of flows of the original mutual authentication protocol. We show in this part the "secure" AKE protocol developed through these two design approaches is identical to the secure version of STS described in the other part, and thus possesses the desired features of a secure AKE protocol. We also give a proof of security of the secure AKE protocol developed under our design methodology.

Michèle Feltz

Chae Hoon Lim, Pil Joong Lee

Mihir Bellare Y, Ran Canetti, Hugo Krawczyk

We present a general framework for constructing and analyzing authentication protocols in realistic models of communication networks. This framework provides a sound formalization for the authentication problem and suggests simple and attractive design principles for general authentication and key exchange protocols. The key element in our approach is a modular treatment of the authentication problem in cryptographic protocols; this applies to the definition of security, to the design of the protocols, and to their analysis. In particular, following this modular approach, we show how to systematically transform solutions that work in a model of idealized authenticated communications into solutions that are secure in the realistic setting of communication channels controlled by an active adversary. Using these principles we construct and prove the security of simple and practical authentication and key-exchange protocols. In particular, we provide a security analysis of some well-known key exchange protocols (e.g. authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange), and of some of the techniques underlying the design of several authentication protocols that are currently being

In-Kon Kang, Do-Hoon Lee, Bong Ju Lee +1 more

An EPON which is going on standardization in IEEE 802.3ah, is tree topology consists of a OLT and multiple ONU using passive optical components, so this network is susceptible to variable security threats - eavesdropping, masquerading, denial of service and so on. In this paper, we design a security protocol supporting authentication and confidentiality services in MAC layer in order to prevent these security threats and to guarantee secure data exchange The designed security protocol introduce public-key based authentication and key management protocols for efficient key management, and choose Rijndael algorithm, which is recent standard of AES, to provide the confidentiality of EPON Proposed authentication and key management protocols perform authentication and public-key exchange at a time, and are secure protocols using derived common cipher key by exchanging public random number To implement the designed security protocol, we propose the procedures of authentication and public-key exchange, session key update, key recovery. This proposed protocol is verified using unknown session key, forward secrecy, unknown key-share, key-compromise impersonation