We examine the role of session key construction in provablysecure key establishment protocols. We revisit an ID-based key establishment protocol due to Chen & Kudla (2003) and an ID-based protocol 2P-IDAKA due to McCullagh & Barreto (2005). Both protocols carry proofs of security in a weaker variant of the Bellare & Rogaway (1993) model where the adversary is not allowed to make any Reveal query. We advocate the importance of such a (Reveal) query as it captures the known-key security requirement. We then demonstrate that a small change to the way that session keys are constructed in both protocols results in these protocols being secure without restricting the adversary from asking the Reveal queries in most situations. We point out some errors in the existing proof for protocol 2P-IDAKA, and provide proof sketches for the improved Chen & Kudla’s protocol. We conclude with a brief discussion on ways to construct session keys in key establishment protocols.
Authenticated Group Key Agreement(AGKA) protocol allows a group of users in a public network to share a session key which may be used to achieve desirable secure communication.The protocol compiler proposed by Abdalla et al transforms any provably secure authenticated 2-party key establishment into a provably secure AGKE with two more rounds of communication.This paper points out an impersonation attack against the protocol compiler that two malicious users can impersonate an entity to agree some session keys in a new group if these two malicious users have the previous commitment transcripts of the entity.The improvement to eliminate the security leaks is proposed.