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KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems

Security Weaknesses in Harn-Lin and Dutta-Barua Protocols for Group Key Establishment

Junghyun Nam

Published Jan 1, 2012• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.3837/tiis.2012.02.018

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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.
A tripartite authenticated key agreement protocol is designed for three entities to communicate securely over an open network particularly with a shared key. Recently, we have improved a one-round tripartite authenticated key agreement protocol proposed by Lin-Li due to its vulnerability to the forging attack in our previous report. However, we have later discovered that both the original Lin-Li's scheme and our previous enhanced protocol are vulnerable to the insider replay attack. Moreover, we have also realized that both protocols have falsely claimed the forward secrecy attribute. In this paper, we will revise our improvements and again secure this protocol against these cryptanalytic attacks while recovering the precious perfect forward secrecy property.
A tripartite authenticated key agreement protocol is designed for three entities to communicate securely over an open network particularly with a shared key. Recently, we have improved a one-round tripartite authenticated key agreement protocol proposed by Lin-Li due to its vulnerability to the forging attack in our previous report. However, we have later discovered that both the original Lin-Li’s scheme and our previous enhanced protocol are vulnerable to the insider replay attack. Moreover, we have also realized that both protocols have falsely claimed the forward secrecy attribute. In this paper, we will revise our improvements and again secure this protocol against these cryptanalytic attacks while recovering the precious perfect forward secrecy property. 1.
The MQV key agreement protocol, a technique included in recent standards, is shown in its basic form to be vulnerable to an unknown key-share attack. Although the attack's practical impact on security is minimal---a key confirmation step easily prevents it---the attack is noteworthy in the principles it illustrates about protocol design. First, minor “efficiency improvements” can significantly alter the security properties of a protocol. Second, protocol analysis must consider potential interactions with all parties, not just those that are normally online. Finally, attacks must be assessed in terms of system requirements, not just in isolation.
Group key establishment is an important mechanism to construct a common session key for group communications. Conventional group key establishment protocols use an on-line trusted key generation center (KGC) to transfer the group key for each participant in each session. However, this approach requires that a trusted server be set up, and it incurs communication overhead costs. In this article, we address some security problems and drawbacks associated with existing group key establishment protocols. Besides, we use the concept of secret sharing scheme to propose a secure key transfer protocol to exclude impersonators from accessing the group communication. Our protocol can resist potential attacks and also reduce the overhead of system implementation. In addition, comparisons of the security analysis and functionality of our proposed protocol with some recent protocols are included in this article.