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IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

Unconditionally secure entity authentication

Kaoru Kurosawa

Published Nov 27, 2002• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

An entity-authentication scheme is a two-party protocol by which a party in a distributed system confirms the identity of a communication partner. Bellare and Rogaway (1993) formulated this problem using a complexity theoretic framework. In this paper, we study entity-authentication in an information theoretic framework, where adversaries are infinitely powerful. We first modify the framework given by Bellare and Rogaway to an unconditionally secure setting. Communication between players is entirely controlled by an infinitely powerful adversary A. The adversary can deliver messages out of order and to unintended recipients, and can concoct messages of the adversary's own choosing. What is more, the adversary can control who is attempting to authenticate whom. We then present a lower bound on the cheating probability and a lower bound on the size of keys for unilateral entity authentication protocols. That is, in each session, P/sub i/ authenticates P/sub j/ but P/sub j/ does not authenticate P/sub i/. Finally, we show an entity authentication scheme which is proven to be secure and that meets all the equalities of our bounds.

DOI
10.1109/isit.1998.708903

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An entity-authentication scheme is a two-party protocol by which a party in a distributed system confirms the identity of a communication partner. Bellare and Rogaway (1993) formulated this problem using a complexity theoretic framework. In this paper, we study entity-authentication in an information theoretic framework, where adversaries are infinitely powerful. We first modify the framework given by Bellare and Rogaway to an unconditionally secure setting. Communication between players is entirely controlled by an infinitely powerful adversary A. The adversary can deliver messages out of order and to unintended recipients, and can concoct messages of the adversary's own choosing. What is more, the adversary can control who is attempting to authenticate whom. We then present a lower bound on the cheating probability and a lower bound on the size of keys for unilateral entity authentication protocols. That is, in each session, P/sub i/ authenticates P/sub j/ but P/sub j/ does not authenticate P/sub i/. Finally, we show an entity authentication scheme which is proven to be secure and that meets all the equalities of our bounds.
We present a systematic approach to define and study authentication notions in authenticated key-exchange protocols. We propose and use a flexible and expressive predicate-based definitional framework. Our definitions capture key and entity authentication, in both implicit and explicit variants, as well as key and entity confirmation, for authenticated key-exchange protocols. In particular, we capture critical notions in the authentication space such as key-compromise impersonation resistance and security against unknown key-share attacks. We first discuss these definitions within the Bellare-Rogaway model and then extend them to Canetti-Krawczyk-style models. We then show two useful applications of our framework. First, we look at the authentication guarantees of three representative protocols to draw several useful lessons for protocol design. The core technical contribution of this paper is then to formally establish that composition of secure implicitly authenticated key-exchange with subsequent confirmation protocols yields explicit authentication guarantees. Without a formal separation of implicit and explicit authentication from secrecy, a proof of this folklore result could not have been established.
An authentication protocol is a procedure by which a sender tries to convey n bits of information, which we call an input message, to a receiver. An adversary controls the network over which the sender and the receiver talk and may change any message before it reaches its destination. This paper deals with the simple scenario where two parties, Alice and Bob, communicate and want to assure that the message received by Bob is the one sent by Alice. Unconditional cryptographic security cannot be generated simply from scratch, but must be based on some given primitive to start with. In this paper, we introduce a message authentication protocol with unconditional cryptographic security. More precisely, we give protocols using a weakly secret key allowing for the exchange of authenticated messages.
So far, all solutions proposed for authenticated key agreement combine key agreement and authentication into a single cryptographic protocol. However, in many important application scenarios, key agreement and entity authentication are clearly separated protocols. This fact enables efficient attacks on the naïve combination of these protocols. In this paper, we propose new compilers for two-party key agreement and authentication, which are provably secure in the standard Bellare-Rogaway model. The constructions are generic: key agreement is executed first and results (without intervention of the adversary) in a secret session key on both sides. This key (or a derived key) is handed over, together with a transcript of all key exchange messages, to the authentication protocol, where it is combined with the random challenge(s) exchanged during authentication.
A key distribution scheme is a method by means of which a trusted party distributes pieces of information among a set of users in such a way that each group of them can compute a common key for secure communication. In this paper we present a model for unconditionally secure key distribution schemes, i.e., schemes whose security is independent of the power of the adversary. We prove lower bounds on the amount of information the trusted party has to generate and each user has to keep secret in such schemes, and we show that some previous unconditionally secure models for key distribution fall in our model. As a consequence, the lower bounds given in the literature for these models can be seen as corollaries of our results. Hence, the main contribution of the paper consists in pointing out a sort of common structure underlying some apparently different key distribution techniques.
Authenticated session key distribution protocol is an important cryptographic technique in the secure communication areas. We present a new method for the authenticated exchange of messages in the three-party case, and abandon the idea of authentication which was finished with encryption and decryption in the Bellare-Rogaway model. Instead, the non-interactive zero-knowledge is applied to our protocol. We give an illumination for some important properties of security and depict a feasible idea of provably security with zero-knowledge.
Quantum cryptography offers a way of key agreement, which is unbreakable by any external adversary. Authentication is of crucial importance, as perfect secrecy is worthless if the identity of the addressee cannot be ensured before sending important information. Message authentication has been studied thoroughly, but no approach seems to be able to explicitly counter meet-in-the-middle impersonation attacks. The goal of this paper is the development of an authentication scheme being resistant against active adversaries controlling the communication channel. The scheme is built on top of a key-establishment protocol and is unconditionally secure if built upon quantum cryptographic key exchange. In general, the security is the same as for the key-agreement protocol lying underneath.