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ON THE (IN)SECURITY OF GROUP KEY TRANSFER PROTOCOLS BASED ON SECRET SHARING

Ruxandra F. Olimid

Published Jan 1, 2013• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Group Key Transfer (GKT) protocols allow multiple parties to share a common secret key: a trusted Key Generation Center (KGC) selects a uniformly random value that has never been used before and securely distributes it to the legitimate principals. The paper restricts to GKT based on secret sharing; it briefly reviews the security goals and the existing formal security models. We motivate our work by the lack of GKT protocols based on secret sharing that are proved secure in a formal security model. Most of the recent proposals only provide informal and incomplete arguments to claim security, which makes them susceptible to known vulnerabilities. We support our affirmation by exemplifying with three different types of attacks (replay attack, insider attack and known key attack) mounted against protocols published within the last three years. We emphasize that none of these attacks would have been possible against a GKT protocol proved secure in a usual formal security model.

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Group Key Transfer (GKT) protocols allow multiple parties to share a common secret key: a trusted Key Generation Center (KGC) selects a uniformly random value that has never been used before and securely distributes it to the legitimate principals. The paper restricts to GKT based on secret sharing; it briefly reviews the security goals and the existing formal security models. We motivate our work by the lack of GKT protocols based on secret sharing that are proved secure in a formal security model. Most of the recent proposals only provide informal and incomplete arguments to claim security, which makes them susceptible to known vulnerabilities. We support our affirmation by exemplifying with three different types of attacks (replay attack, insider attack and known key attack) mounted against protocols published within the last three years. We emphasize that none of these attacks would have been possible against a GKT protocol proved secure in a usual formal security model.
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.
Group key exchange protocols allow their participants to compute a secret key which can be used to ensure security and privacy for various multi- party applications. The resulting group key should be computed through coop- eration of all protocol participants such that none of them is trusted to have any advantage concerning the protocol's output. This trust relationship states the main difference between group key exchange and group key transport protocols. Obvi- ously, misbehaving participants in group key exchange protocols may try to influ- ence the resulting group key, thereby disrupting this trust relationship, and also causing further security threats. This paper analyzes the currently known secu- rity models for group key exchange protocols with respect to this kind of attacks by malicious participants and proposes an extended model to remove the identi- fied limitations. Additionally, it proposes an efficient and provably secure generic solution, a compiler, to guarantee these additional security goals for group keys exchanged in the presence of malicious participants.
The main goal of cryptography is to enable secure communication over a public channel; often a secret shared among the communicating parties is used to achieve this. The process by which these parties agree on such a shared secret is called key agreement. In this thesis, we focus on two-party key agreement protocols in the public-key setting and study the various methods used to establish and validate public keys. We pay particular attention to certificateless key agreement schemes and attempt to formalize a relevant notion of security. To that end, we give a possible extension of the existing extended Canetti-Krawzcyk security model applicable to the certificateless setting. We observe that none of the certificateless protocols we have seen in the literature are secure in this model; it is an open question whether such schemes exist. We analyze several published certificateless key agreement protocols, demonstrating the existence of key compromise impersonation attacks and even a man-in-the-middle attack in one case, contrary to the claims of the authors. We also briefly describe weaknesses exhibited by these protocols in the context of our suggested security model.
Authenticated Group Key Agreement Protocols are protocols allowing\na group of principals to contributively generate a key by the\nexchange of messages on a network possibly controlled by an\nattacker. Furthermore, their execution also guarantees all group\nmembers that the key they obtained can only be known by the other\nintended protocol participants. These protocols can be exploited\nin many applications such as audio or videoconferencing,\nreplicated servers (such as database, web, time servers), chat or\nnetwork games for instance. \n AGKAP's present several particularities that make them interesting\ncase studies for research in the theory of security. At first, the\nconsideration of the number of protocol participants as a\nparameter raises several complexity problems that are not present\nin the classical two or three-party frameworks. Furthermore, up to\nnow, the security properties of group protocols have roughly been\nconsidered as direct extensions of two-party properties, what does\nnot capture several plausible attack scenarios. A second\ninteresting aspect of the analysis of AGKAP's is the consideration\nof Diffie-Hellman-type primitives, that present properties out\nof the scope of most classical models. \n We started our study with the construction of a simple model for\nthe analysis of a classical family of protocols: the Cliques\nAGKAP's. This allowed us to discover several attacks and define\ndifferent flavors of group security properties. We then tried to\nfix these protocols, what led us to extend our model in order to\nprove that it is in fact impossible to build a secure AGKAP based\non the same design assumptions as the Cliques protocols. Finally,\nwe designed a new AGKAP based on different cryptographic\nprimitives (signature and hash functions) for which we proved\nauthentication, freshness and secrecy properties. A comparison\nwith a similar AGKAP developed in parallel to ours is also\nproposed.
Physical-layer group secret-key (GSK) generation is an effective way of generating secret keys in wireless networks, wherein the nodes exploit inherent randomness in the wireless channels to generate group keys, which are subsequently applied to secure messages while broadcasting, relaying, and other network-level communications. While existing GSK protocols focus on securing the common source of randomness from external eavesdroppers, they assume that the legitimate nodes of the group are trusted. In this paper, we address insider attacks from the legitimate participants of the wireless network during the key generation process. Instead of addressing conspicuous attacks such as switching-off communication, injecting noise, or denying consensus on group keys, we introduce stealth attacks that can go undetected against state-of- the-art GSK schemes. We propose two forms of attacks, namely: (i) different-key attacks, wherein an insider attempts to generate different keys at different nodes, especially across nodes that are out of range so that they fail to recover group messages despite possessing the group key, and (ii) low-rate key attacks, wherein an insider alters the common source of randomness so as to reduce the key-rate. We also discuss various detection techniques, which are based on detecting anomalies and inconsistencies on the channel measurements at the legitimate nodes. Through simulations we show that GSK generation schemes are vulnerable to insider-threats, especially on topologies that cannot support additional secure links between neighbouring nodes to verify the attacks.