A framework for design of key establishment protocols

Carsten Rudolph

Colin Boyd

Mounita Saha, Dipanwita RoyChowdhury

The design of a secure and efficient key establishment protocol is one of the toughest challenge in communication protocol design. In the literature many key establishment protocols claimed to be secure against some attacks were later shown to be weak against new attacks. In this work, we have identified a class of weakness named as insider-replay in some existing protocols and proposed a design principle to avoid the weakness. Based on the design principle, we have proposed an efficient key establishment protocol. The proposed protocol is shown to be provably secure under formal security model and averts insider-replay. We have also analyzed the efficiency of the proposed protocol in comparison with existing protocols.

Junghyun Nam

Key establishment protocols are fundamental for establishing secure communication channels over public insecure networks.Security must be given the topmost priority in the design of a key establishment protocol.In this work, we provide a security analysis on two recent key establishment protocols: Harn and Lin's group key transfer protocol and Dutta and Barua's group key agreement protocol.Our analysis shows that both the Harn-Lin protocol and the Dutta-Barua protocol have a flaw in their design and can be easily attacked.The attack we mount on the Harn-Lin protocol is a replay attack whereby a malicious user can obtain the long-term secrets of any other users.The Dutta-Barua protocol is vulnerable to an unknown key-share attack.For each of the two protocols, we present how to eliminate their security vulnerabilities.We also improve Dutta and Barua's proof of security to make it valid against unknown key share attacks.

Colin Boyd, Anish Mathuria

Yuqiao Jin, Yuyang Zhou, Jiangtao Ji +2 more

In an Internet of drone (IoD) network, a low-power drone intends to access a strong controller to obtain some services. The basic security requirements for an IoD are user authentication and key establishment. With the user authentication, an unauthorized drone can access the controller and get the services. With the key establishment, the drone and the controller can communicate in a secure way. Currently, some authenticated key establishment (AKE) protocols were designed. However, many of them are homogeneous, in which both sides of communication belong to public key infrastructure (PKI) or identity-based cryptosystem (IBC) or certificateless public key cryptosystem (CL-PKC). Such design does not follow the characteristic in the IoD. In this paper, we design a heterogeneous authenticated key establishment protocol for an IoD. In our design, the drone is in IBC environment and the controller is in CLC environment. Compared with previous works, our design has the lowest computational cost and communication cost.