Group-oriented cryptographic protocols

Andrew C. M. Hutchison, Kurt Bauknecht

Martin R. Albrecht, Benjamin Dowling, Daniel Lee Jones

Focusing on its cryptographic core, we provide the first formal description of the Matrix secure group messaging protocol. Observing that no existing secure messaging model in the literature captures the relationships (and shared state) between users, their devices and the groups they are a part of, we introduce the Device-Oriented Group Messaging model to capture these key characteristics of the Matrix protocol. Utilising our new formalism, we determine that Matrix achieves the basic security notions of confidentiality and authentication, provided it introduces authenticated group membership. On the other hand, while the state sharing functionality in Matrix conflicts with advanced security notions in the literature – forward and post-compromise security – it enables features such as history sharing and account recovery, provoking broader questions about how such security notions should be conceptualised.

Hans Delfs, Helmut Knebl

Sigurd Eskeland

Abstract Cryptographic schemes that provide establishment of secret keys among a number of participants are generally known as conference key establishment schemes and key broadcasting schemes. In any case, such protocols provide secure establishment of group-oriented cryptographic keys, but with the costs of multiple transmissions of key establishment messages and in some cases multiple secret user keys. In this paper, we present a simple and straightforward efficient non-interactive group-oriented key establishment scheme that provides off-line computation of secret group keys, without computations and transmissions of key establishment messages

Rui Zhang, Lei Zhang

Non-interactive key exchange (NIKE) enables two or multiple parties (just knowing the public system parameters and each other's public key) to derive a (group) session key without the need for interaction. Recently, NIKE in multi-party settings has been attached importance. However, we note that most existing multi-party NIKE protocols, underlying costly cryptographic techniques (i.e., multilinear maps and indistinguishability obfuscation), lead to high computational costs once employed in practice. Therefore, it is a challenging task to achieve multi-party NIKE protocols by using more practical cryptographic primitives. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient NIKE protocol for secure communications in dynamic groups, whose construction only bases on bilinear maps. This protocol allows multiple parties to negotiate asymmetric group keys (a public group encryption key and each party's decryption key) without any interaction among one another. Additionally, the protocol supports updating of group keys in an efficient and non-interactive way once any party outside a group or any group member joins or leaves the group. Further, any party called a sender (even outside a group) intending to connect with some or all of group members called receivers in a group, just needs to generate a ciphertext with constant size under the public group encryption key, and only the group member who is the real receiver can decrypt the ciphertext to obtain the session key. We prove our protocol captures the correctness and indistinguishability of session key under k-Bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent (k-BDHE) assumption. Efficiency evaluation shows the efficiency of our protocol.