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ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)

Modeling insider attacks on group key-exchange protocols

Jonathan I. Katz, Ji Sun Shin

Published Nov 7, 2005• 184 citations

Abstract

Protocols for authenticated key exchange (AKE) allow parties within an insecure network to establish a common session key which can then be used to secure their future communication. It is fair to say that group AKE is currently less well understood than the case of two-party AKE; in particular, attacks by malicious insiders --- a concern specific to the group setting --- have so far been considered only in a relatively "ad-hoc" fashion. The main contribution of this work is to address this deficiency by providing a formal, comprehensive model and definition of security for group AKE which automatically encompasses insider attacks. We do so by defining an appropriate ideal functionality for group AKE within the universal composability (UC) framework. As a side benefit, any protocol secure with respect to our definition is secure even when run concurrently with other protocols, and the key generated by any such protocol may be used securely in any subsequent application.In addition to proposing this definition, we show that the resulting notion of security is strictly stronger than the one proposed by Bresson, et al. (termed "AKE-security"), and that our definition implies all previously-suggested notions of security against insider attacks. We also show a simple technique for converting any AKE-secure protocol into one secure with respect to our definition.

DOI: 10.1145/1102120.1102146

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Protocols for authenticated key exchange (AKE) allow parties within an insecure network to establish a common session key which can then be used to secure their future communication. It is fair to say that group AKE is currently less well understood than the case of two-party AKE; in particular, attacks by malicious insiders --- a concern specific to the group setting --- have so far been considered only in a relatively "ad-hoc" fashion. The main contribution of this work is to address this deficiency by providing a formal, comprehensive model and definition of security for group AKE which automatically encompasses insider attacks. We do so by defining an appropriate ideal functionality for group AKE within the universal composability (UC) framework. As a side benefit, any protocol secure with respect to our definition is secure even when run concurrently with other protocols, and the key generated by any such protocol may be used securely in any subsequent application.In addition to proposing this definition, we show that the resulting notion of security is strictly stronger than the one proposed by Bresson, et al. (termed "AKE-security"), and that our definition implies all previously-suggested notions of security against insider attacks. We also show a simple technique for converting any AKE-secure protocol into one secure with respect to our definition.

The well-known method for a group key exchange (GKE) protocol to be against insider attack is to make use of signatures. However, using signatures considerably degrades the performance of the GKE protocol. In this paper, we propose a new method to resist insider attack. The underlying tool of our method is a two-party authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol, which can be used to authenticate all other participants' session identifiers instead of using signatures. Based on the two- party AKE protocol, we propose an efficient insider-resistant GKE protocol without signatures. We show that our proposal is provably secure against insider attack if the underlying two-party AKE protocol is secure.

We treat the security of group key exchange (GKE) in the universal composability (UC) framework. Analyzing GKE protocols in the UC framework naturally addresses attacks by malicious insiders. We define an ideal functionality for GKE that captures contributiveness in addition to other desired security goals. We show that an efficient two-round protocol securely realizes the proposed functionality in the random oracle model. As a result, we obtain the most efficient UC-secure contributory GKE protocol known.

Malicious insider security of authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol addresses the situation that an AKE protocol is secure even with existing dishonest parties established by adversary in corresponding security experiment. In the eCK model, the EstablishParty query is used to model the malicious insider setting. However such strong query is not clearly formalized so far. We show that the proof of possession assumptions for registering public keys are of prime importance to malicious insider security. In contrast to previous schemes, we present an eCK secure protocol in the standard model, without assuming impractical, strong, concurrent zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge of secret keys done to the CA at key registration. The security proof of our scheme is based on standard pairing assumption, collision resistant hash functions, bilinear decision Diffie-Hellman (BDDH) and decision linear Diffie-Hellman (DLIN) assumptions, and pseudo-random functions with pairwise independent random source πPRF [14].

Abstract. Group key exchange (GKE) protocols can be used to guarantee confidentiality and group authentication formalization (security model) that considers the environment of the protocol and identifies its security goals. The first security model for GKE protocols was proposed by Bresson, Chevassut, Pointcheval, and Quisquater in 2001, and has been subsequently applied in many security proofs. Their definitions of AKE- and MA-security became meanwhile standard. In this paper we analyze the BCPQ model and some of its later appeared modifications and identify several security risks resulting from the technical construction of this model – the notion of partnering. Consequently, we propose a revised model with extended definitions for AKE- and MA-security capturing, in addition, attacks of malicious protocol participants. Further, we analyze some well-known generic solutions (compilers) for AKE- and MA-security of GKE protocols proposed based on the definitions of the BCPQ model and its variants and identify several limitations resulting from the underlying assumptions. In order to remove these limitations and at the same time to show that our revised security model is in fact practical enough for the construction of reductionist security proofs we describe a modified compiler which provides AKE- and MA-security for any GKE protocol, under standard cryptographic assumptions. Key words: Group key exchange, extended security model, malicious participants, compiler for AKE- and

Recent work by Krawczyk [10] and Menezes [14] has highlighted the importance of under-standing well the guarantees and limitations of formal security models when using them to prove the security of protocols. In this paper we focus on security models for authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols. We observe that there are several classes of attacks on AKE protocols that lie outside the scope of the Canetti-Krawczyk model. Some of these additional attacks have already been considered by Krawczyk [10]. In an attempt to bring these attacks within the scope of the security model we extend the Canetti-Krawczyk model for AKE security by providing significantly greater powers to the adversary. Our contribution is a more compact, integrated, and comprehensive formulation of the security model. We then introduce a new AKE protocol called NAXOS and prove that it is secure against these stronger adversaries. 1

Several protocols implementing attribute-based group key exchange, which allows users with certain set of attributes to establish a session key, have been proposed in recent years.However, attacks on attribute-based group key exchange in current research have been considered only in stand-alone fashion.Thus these protocols may be vulnerable when run with other protocol sessions concurrently.We treat the security of attribute-based group key exchange in the universal composability framework to ensure that a protocol remains secure when run with arbitrary protocol sessions concurrently.More specifically, we define an ideal functionality for attribute-based group key exchange first, then propose a two-round protocol based on a primitive called encapsulation policy attribute-based key encapsulation mechanism.In addition, a complete security proof of our protocol in the universal composability framework under random oracle model is given.