International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing

A new hierarchical and scalable group key exchange protocol with XOR operation

Hongyuan Wang, Liehuang Zhu, Zhenghe Yang, Lejian Liao

Published Jan 1, 2013• 0 citations

Abstract

With the rapid development of the technology of group broadcast, distributed computation and wireless network, how to construct a secure Group Key Exchange (GKE) protocol for a number of participants on channels is drawing more and more attention. Meanwhile, security analysis of cryptographic protocol has been a hotspot. Symbolic analysis is a major approach to analyse the security of protocols. In this paper, we propose a GKE protocol originated from a two-participant key exchange protocol and prove that the protocol is secure. We represent the protocol as processes in the spi calculus, and state their security properties as queries in ProVerif, an automatic analyser based on spi calculus.

DOI: 10.1504/ijwmc.2013.056550

Related papers

Scalable Group Key Exchange for Securing Distributed Operating Systems

Junghyun Nam, Minkyu Park, Sangchul Han +2 more

Distributed operating systems are designed to run over a collection of computing nodes that are spatially disseminated and communicate through a computer network. The computing nodes interact collaboratively with each other in order to pursue a common purpose. Protecting group communication between the collaborating nodes against potential attacks is one of the major challenges faced by the designers of distributed operating systems. This challenge can be effectively addressed by a group key exchange (GKE) protocol which allows a group of communicating parties to build a secure multicast channel over an insecure network. In this work, we propose a scalable GKE protocol that achieves both constant round complexity and logarithmic computation complexity. Our GKE protocol achieves its scalability by employing a complete binary tree structure combined with a so-called ”nonce-chained authentication technique”. Besides the scalability, our protocol features provable security against active adversaries in a well-defined communication model.

Journal of information science and engineeringSep 1, 20123 citations

Constant Round Group Key Exchange with Logarithmic Computational Complexity.

Junghyun Nam, Youngsook Lee, Dongho Won

Protocols for group key exchange (GKE) are cryptographic algorithms that describe how a group of parties communicating over a public network can come up with a common secret key. Due to their critical role in building secure multicast channels, a number of GKE protocols have been proposed over the years in a variety of settings. However despite many impressive achievements, it still remains a challenging problem to design a secure GKE protocol which scales very well for large groups. Our observation is that all provably-secure constant-round GKE protocols providing forward secrecy thus far are not fully scalable, but have a computational complexity that scales only linearly in group size. Motivated by this observation, we propose a new GKE protocol that not only offers full scalability in all directions but also attains provable security against active adversaries. Full scalability is achieved by using a complete binary tree structure where users are arranged on both internal and leaf nodes. Security is proved via reduction to the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in a well-defined formal model of communication and adversarial capabilities.

Jan 1, 20061 citation

Design and analysis of group key exchange protocols

M. Choudary Gorantla

A group key exchange (GKE) protocol allows a set of parties to agree upon a common secret session key over a public network. In this thesis, we focus on designing efficient GKE protocols using public key techniques and appropriately revising security models for GKE protocols. For the purpose of modelling and analysing the security of GKE protocols we apply the widely accepted computational complexity approach. The contributions of the thesis to the area of GKE protocols are manifold. We propose the first GKE protocol that requires only one round of communication and is proven secure in the standard model. Our protocol is generically constructed from a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM). We also suggest an efficient KEM from the literature, which satisfies the underlying security notion, to instantiate the generic protocol. We then concentrate on enhancing the security of one-round GKE protocols. A new model of security for forward secure GKE protocols is introduced and a generic one-round GKE protocol with forward security is then presented. The security of this protocol is also proven in the standard model. We also propose an efficient forward secure encryption scheme that can be used to instantiate the generic GKE protocol. Our next contributions are to the security models of GKE protocols. We observe that the analysis of GKE protocols has not been as extensive as that of two-party key exchange protocols. Particularly, the security attribute of key compromise impersonation (KCI) resilience has so far been ignored for GKE protocols. We model the security of GKE protocols addressing KCI attacks by both outsider and insider adversaries. We then show that a few existing protocols are not secure against KCI attacks. A new proof of security for an existing GKE protocol is given under the revised model assuming random oracles. Subsequently, we treat the security of GKE protocols in the universal composability (UC) framework. We present a new UC ideal functionality for GKE protocols capturing the security attribute of contributiveness. An existing protocol with minor revisions is then shown to realize our functionality in the random oracle model. Finally, we explore the possibility of constructing GKE protocols in the attribute-based setting. We introduce the concept of attribute-based group key exchange (AB-GKE). A security model for AB-GKE and a one-round AB-GKE protocol satisfying our security notion are presented. The protocol is generically constructed from a new cryptographic primitive called encapsulation policy attribute-based KEM (EP-AB-KEM), which we introduce in this thesis. We also present a new EP-AB-KEM with a proof of security assuming generic groups and random oracles. The EP-AB-KEM can be used to instantiate our generic AB-GKE protocol.

Faculty of Science and Technology; Information Security InstituteJan 1, 20101 citation

Scalable group key exchange protocol with provable security

Chengbang Li, Chunxiang Xu

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a scalable group key exchange (GKE) protocol with provable security, which is used to establish a confidential channel. Design/methodology/approach The protocol in this paper uses line structure, rather than formal ring structure or tree structure, to reduce the amount of calculation and communication. Findings In the protocol, every participant just need send two messages. The security can be proved under the Decisional Diffie‐Hellman (DDH) problem. Originality/value Using the protocol provides an efficient and secure method to allow group users to share a common key.

COMPEL The International Journal for Computation and Mathematics in Electrical and Electronic EngineeringMar 1, 20134 citations

Computationally Sound and Effective Symbolic Analysis of Group Key Exchange Protocols

Zhang Zi

The computational soundness of symbolic analysis is always argued,because the cryptographic primitives are viewed as black boxes,and the specific security properties of those cryptographic primitives have not been considered yet.Moreover,this kind of approaches is ineffective,when it is used to analyze group key exchange protocols with a large number of participants.This paper considers those problems above,and proposes computationally sound and effective symbolic analysis of group key exchange protocols.More specifically,we design a pattern function for symbolic expression,so as to define the concrete security properties that modular exponentiation operation needs satisfy.Based on that,we prove the symbolic analysis of Burmester-Desmedt protocol is computationally sound in universally composable security framework.Furthermore,we use mathematical inductive method to prove the security of Burmester-Desmedt protocol is unrelated to the number of participants.The number of the participants does not affect symbolic analysis.As a result,the efficiency of symbolic analysis is improved.

Chinese Journal of ComputersJan 1, 20121 citation

Flexible Group Key Exchange with On-Demand Computation of Subgroup Keys (Full Version)

Michel Ferreira Abdalla, Mark Manulis, David Pointcheval

Modern multi-user communication systems, including popular instant messaging tools, social network platforms, and cooperative-work applications, oer exible forms of com- munication and exchange of data. At any time point concurrent communication sessions involv- ing dierent subsets of users can be invoked. The traditional tool for achieving security in a multi-party communication environment are group key exchange (GKE) protocols that provide participants with a secure group key for their subsequent communication. Yet, in communica- tion scenarios where various user subsets may be involved in dierent sessions the deployment of classical GKE protocols has clear performance and scalability limitations as each new session should be preceded by a separate execution of the protocol. The motivation of this work is to study the possibility of designing more exible GKE protocols allowing not only the computation

Jan 1, 20100 citations