Secure and minimal protocols for authenticated key distribution

Colin Boyd, Anish Mathuria

Konjengbam Roshan Singh, Divyashikha Sethia

Securing applications that gather and transfer confidential information has become a critical challenge in the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) landscape. Such data’s authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality must be guaranteed while reducing security functions’ computation and communication overhead to accommodate the numerous constrained devices involved. Group authentication and key management are essential aspects of IoT security, but existing protocols often need to be more computationally expensive for IoT applications and must take care of anonymization. Consequently, IoT devices may be open to potential cyber-attacks due to the use of simple security primitives. Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) can enable in lightweight approach to authentication and key distribution among group members. The factorial tree and Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) can minimize communication messages required to renew the keys. This paper presents a novel protocol, Anonymized Lightweight PUF-based group Authentication with Key distribution (ALPAK) for IoT Devices, which improves the PUF-Based Lightweight Group Authentication and Key Distribution Protocol (PLGAKD) to enhance the anonymity of IoT devices. The paper further presents the formal verification of the ALPAK scheme with the Scyther tool and detailed security analysis.

Andrew C. M. Hutchison, Kurt Bauknecht

Nicolas Laurent-Puig, Mina Doosti, Adriano Innocenzi +1 more

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) enables Information-Theoretically Secure (ITS) key exchange, robust even against future quantum computing threats. However, a fundamental limitation of QKD is the requirement for an authenticated classical channel, which necessitates a pre-shared secret key. In this work, we address this challenge by adopting a Hybrid Entangled Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) protocol for authentication. We demonstrate that this PUF-based method generates an ITS initial key under minimal explicit hardware assumptions. This approach allows us to experimentally perform a fully ITS-authenticated entanglement-based QKD protocol that relies solely on such assumptions, effectively eliminating the need for pre-shared secrets. This represents a significant step towards the practical realization of quantum network protocols using lightweight, readily available hardware assumptions, without weakening security guarantees.

Robbi Rahim

Abstract Cryptography is one type of protection that is widely used to secure information, encryption and decryption and the use of keys is a common process used to secure information; and also the cryptographic processes have a classic problem that is the distribution of keys that are vulnerable to interception when the key is sent by the sender to the receiver, the cryptographic protocol (Authentication) could be used to minimize key distribution problem because there is no need for key exchanges. Shamir’s Three-Pass Protocol, Secret Splitting, Bit-Commitment Protocol and Blind Signature are few cryptographic protocols that can be used to help with key distribution issues, this article performs systematic approach to protocol cryptography for security level and the using other algorithms to combine with protocol.

Chae Hoon Lim, Pil Joong Lee