Tripartite Key Agreement Protocols and Insider Impersonation Attack

Lihua Wang, Takeshi Okamoto, Tsuyoshi Takagi +1 more

Hung‐Yu Chien

Hung‐Yu Chien, Ru-Yu Lin

Even though several certificate-based tripartite key agreement protocols with pairings have been proposed, the insider impersonation attack was not noticed. This specific threat applies to those key agreement protocols where there are more than two communicating parties. This paper re-examines the previous protocols. We find that both Shim's scheme and the LHL scheme are not secure. The Shim scheme is weak in key-compromise impersonation attack, insider impersonation attack, and replay attack. The LHL tripartite key scheme is vulnerable to insider attack, outsider impersonation attack, and key-compromise impersonation attack. Furthemore, we propose two approaches to improve the security. Our schemes are more efficient than Al-Riyami-Paterson's tripartite key confirmation protocol, which is the most secure one among the referenced works.

Chunbo Ma, Jun Ao, Jianhua Li

Meng-Hui Lim, Sang-Gon Lee, Hoon Jae Lee

A key agreement protocol is designed for two or more entities to agree upon a shared secret key, which can subsequently be used to preserve confidentiality and data integrity over an open network. Since Joux has pioneered the notion of pairing-based tripartite key agreement protocol, various group key agreement schemes have been proposed after then. In 2003, Liu et al. proposed a tripartite identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol using bilinear pairings. Although the scheme is claimed to be efficient and secure, we discover that it is in fact breakable. In this paper, we highlight the flaw by demonstrating an insider impersonation attack on the scheme and suggest a few enhancements to conquer the defect.

Simon Blake-Wilson⋆⋆, Don B. Johnson, Alfred Menezes