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Security and Communication Networks

On robust key agreement based on public key authentication

Feng Hao

Published Apr 18, 2012• 7 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper discusses public key-authenticated key agreement protocols. First, we critically analyze several authenticated key agreement protocols and uncover various theoretical and practical flaws. In particular, we present two new attacks on the Hashed Menezes-Qu-Vanstone HMQV protocol, which is currently being standardized by IEEE P1363. These attacks suggest the caution one should take when interpreting theoretical results from a formal model. We further point out that many of the protocol failures in the past are caused by sidestepping an important engineering principle, namely, Do not assume that a message you receive has a particular form such as gr for known r unless you can check this. Constructions in the past generally resisted this principle on the grounds of efficiency: checking the knowledge of the exponent is commonly seen as too expensive. In a concrete example, we demonstrate how to effectively integrate the zero-knowledge proof primitive into the protocol design and, meanwhile, achieve good efficiency. Our new key agreement protocol, YAK, has comparable computational efficiency to the MQV and HMQV protocols with clear advantages on security. Among all the related techniques, our protocol appears to be the simplest so far. We believe simplicity is also an important engineering principle. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

DOI
10.1002/sec.550

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On robust key agreement based on public key authentication

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This paper discusses public-key authenticated key agreement protocols. First, we critically analyze several authenticatedkey agreement protocols and uncover various theoretical and practical flaws. In particular, we present two new attacks onthe HMQV protocol, which is currently being standardized by IEEE P1363. These attacks suggest the caution one shouldtake when interpreting theoretical results from a formal model. We further point out that many of the protocol failures inthe past are caused by sidestepping an important engineering principle, namely “Do not assume that a message you receivehas a particular form (such as g^r for known r) unless you can check this”. Constructions in the past generally resistedthis principle on the grounds of efficiency: checking the knowledge of the exponent is commonly seen as too expensive.In a concrete example, we demonstrate how to effectively integrate the zero-knowledge proof primitive into the protocoldesign and meanwhile achieve good efficiency. Our new key agreement protocol, YAK, has comparable computationalefficiency to the MQV and HMQV protocols with clear advantages on security. Among all the related techniques, ourprotocol appears to be the simplest so far. We believe simplicity is also an important engineering principle.

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Abstract This paper considers security analysis of the YAK, a public key‐based authenticated key agreement protocol. The YAK protocol is a variant of the two‐pass HMQV protocol but uses zero‐knowledge proofs for proving knowledge of ephemeral values. In this paper, we show that the YAK protocol lacks joint key control and perfect forward secrecy attributes and is vulnerable to some attacks including unknown key‐share and key‐replication attacks. This invalidates the semantic security of the protocol in several security models. There are also other considerations regarding the impersonation and small subgroup attacks. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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One of the most important and challenging cryptographic primitives in Public Key Cryptography is Key Agreement Protocol where two or more parties share secret values and establish the session key. Many authors have proposed key agreement protocols. In this article, we have viewed some authenticated Key Agreement Protocols and presented a comparative study. We have also described the design principle, security requirement and various attacks on Key Agreement Protocol.

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Cryptanalysis and improvement of the YAK protocol with formal security proof and security verification via Scyther

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Summary Hao proposed the YAK as a robust key agreement based on public‐key authentication, and the author claimed that the YAK protocol withstands all known attacks and therefore is secure against an extremely strong adversary. However, Toorani showed the security flaws in the YAK protocol. This paper shows that the YAK protocol cannot withstand the known key security attack, and its consequences lead us to introduce a new key compromise impersonation attack, where an adversary is allowed to reveal both the shared static secret key between two‐party participation and the ephemeral private key of the initiator party in order to mount this attack. In addition, we present a new security model that covers these attacks against an extremely strong adversary. Moreover, we propose an improved YAK protocol to remedy these attacks and the previous attacks mentioned by Toorani on the YAK protocol, and the proposed protocol uses a verification mechanism in its block design that provides entity authentication and key confirmation. Meanwhile, we show that the proposed protocol is secure in the proposed formal security model under the gap Diffie‐Hellman assumption and the random oracle assumption. Moreover, we verify the security of the proposed protocol and YAK protocol by using an automatic verification method such as the Scyther tool, and the verification result shows that the security claims of the proposed protocol are proven, in contrast to those of the YAK protocol, which are not proven. The security and performance comparisons show that the improved YAK protocol outperforms previous related protocols.

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An efficient protocol for two‐party explicit authenticated key agreement

Minghui Zheng, Huihua Zhou, Jing Chen

Summary Successful and efficient key management plays a critical role toward secured computing and communication systems. Many authenticated key agreement protocols have been proposed to meet the great challenges of information security. The two‐party key agreement protocol can be classified into two categories: implicit and explicit key authentications. This paper investigates the issue on authenticated two‐party key agreement protocol over an insecure public network and extends the existing implicit authenticated key agreement protocol into the explicit one by introducing the authenticators. The advantage of this explicit protocol is that it does not need any fixed public key infrastructure. Furthermore, this explicit protocol is provably secure in the random oracle under the Computation Gap Diffie‐Hellman assumption. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2013.© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience•Dec 26, 2013•11 citations
This paper discusses public key-authenticated key agreement protocols. First, we critically analyze several authenticated key agreement protocols and uncover various theoretical and practical flaws. In particular, we present two new attacks on the Hashed Menezes-Qu-Vanstone HMQV protocol, which is currently being standardized by IEEE P1363. These attacks suggest the caution one should take when interpreting theoretical results from a formal model. We further point out that many of the protocol failures in the past are caused by sidestepping an important engineering principle, namely, Do not assume that a message you receive has a particular form such as gr for known r unless you can check this. Constructions in the past generally resisted this principle on the grounds of efficiency: checking the knowledge of the exponent is commonly seen as too expensive. In a concrete example, we demonstrate how to effectively integrate the zero-knowledge proof primitive into the protocol design and, meanwhile, achieve good efficiency. Our new key agreement protocol, YAK, has comparable computational efficiency to the MQV and HMQV protocols with clear advantages on security. Among all the related techniques, our protocol appears to be the simplest so far. We believe simplicity is also an important engineering principle. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This paper discusses public-key authenticated key agreement protocols. First, we critically analyze several authenticatedkey agreement protocols and uncover various theoretical and practical flaws. In particular, we present two new attacks onthe HMQV protocol, which is currently being standardized by IEEE P1363. These attacks suggest the caution one shouldtake when interpreting theoretical results from a formal model. We further point out that many of the protocol failures inthe past are caused by sidestepping an important engineering principle, namely “Do not assume that a message you receivehas a particular form (such as g^r for known r) unless you can check this”. Constructions in the past generally resistedthis principle on the grounds of efficiency: checking the knowledge of the exponent is commonly seen as too expensive.In a concrete example, we demonstrate how to effectively integrate the zero-knowledge proof primitive into the protocoldesign and meanwhile achieve good efficiency. Our new key agreement protocol, YAK, has comparable computationalefficiency to the MQV and HMQV protocols with clear advantages on security. Among all the related techniques, ourprotocol appears to be the simplest so far. We believe simplicity is also an important engineering principle.
Abstract This paper considers security analysis of the YAK, a public key‐based authenticated key agreement protocol. The YAK protocol is a variant of the two‐pass HMQV protocol but uses zero‐knowledge proofs for proving knowledge of ephemeral values. In this paper, we show that the YAK protocol lacks joint key control and perfect forward secrecy attributes and is vulnerable to some attacks including unknown key‐share and key‐replication attacks. This invalidates the semantic security of the protocol in several security models. There are also other considerations regarding the impersonation and small subgroup attacks. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Summary Hao proposed the YAK as a robust key agreement based on public‐key authentication, and the author claimed that the YAK protocol withstands all known attacks and therefore is secure against an extremely strong adversary. However, Toorani showed the security flaws in the YAK protocol. This paper shows that the YAK protocol cannot withstand the known key security attack, and its consequences lead us to introduce a new key compromise impersonation attack, where an adversary is allowed to reveal both the shared static secret key between two‐party participation and the ephemeral private key of the initiator party in order to mount this attack. In addition, we present a new security model that covers these attacks against an extremely strong adversary. Moreover, we propose an improved YAK protocol to remedy these attacks and the previous attacks mentioned by Toorani on the YAK protocol, and the proposed protocol uses a verification mechanism in its block design that provides entity authentication and key confirmation. Meanwhile, we show that the proposed protocol is secure in the proposed formal security model under the gap Diffie‐Hellman assumption and the random oracle assumption. Moreover, we verify the security of the proposed protocol and YAK protocol by using an automatic verification method such as the Scyther tool, and the verification result shows that the security claims of the proposed protocol are proven, in contrast to those of the YAK protocol, which are not proven. The security and performance comparisons show that the improved YAK protocol outperforms previous related protocols.
LaMacchia, Lauter and Mityagin recently presented a strong security definition for authenticated key agreement strengthening the well-known Canetti-Krawczyk definition. They also described a protocol, called NAXOS, that enjoys a simple security proof in the new model. Compared to MQV and HMQV, NAXOS is less efficient and cannot be readily modified to obtain a one-pass protocol. On the other hand MQV does not have a security proof, and the HMQV security proof is extremely complicated. This paper proposes a new authenticated key agreement protocol, called CMQV (‘Combined’ MQV), which incorporates design principles from MQV, HMQV and NAXOS. The new protocol achieves the efficiency of HMQV and admits a natural one-pass variant. Moreover, we present a simple and intuitive proof that CMQV is secure in the LaMacchia-Lauter-Mityagin model.
Summary Successful and efficient key management plays a critical role toward secured computing and communication systems. Many authenticated key agreement protocols have been proposed to meet the great challenges of information security. The two‐party key agreement protocol can be classified into two categories: implicit and explicit key authentications. This paper investigates the issue on authenticated two‐party key agreement protocol over an insecure public network and extends the existing implicit authenticated key agreement protocol into the explicit one by introducing the authenticators. The advantage of this explicit protocol is that it does not need any fixed public key infrastructure. Furthermore, this explicit protocol is provably secure in the random oracle under the Computation Gap Diffie‐Hellman assumption. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2013.© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.