Entity Authentication and Authenticated Key Transport Protocols Employing Asymmetric Techniques

Simon Blake-Wilson⋆⋆, Alfred Menezes

Colin Boyd, Anish Mathuria, Douglas Stebila

Prashant Nema, Manisha J. Nene

Abstract Authentication of the entity is the initial step toward secure transaction over the internet. The evolution in the nature and types of attacks have forced the commerce industry to move from single factor to multi‐factor authentication technique largely employing biometric codes for human based entity. These biometric codes are unique and therefore, are synonymous to a user identity in the digital world. Hence, safeguarding the Biometric data becomes important for the user. Also, the classical authentication techniques relying on public key encryption schemes are no longer considered safe in the post quantum era. The research in this paper therefore, proposes a quantum based mutual authentication user‐server protocol which employs the principles of quantum mechanics to carry out secure exchange and storage of confidential data. The mathematical formulae validated through demonstration of properties of quantum mechanics verifies the ability of the protocol to work in compromised channel. The detailed security analysis carried out further quantifies the same and builds in confidence to adopt the quantum based mutual authentication protocol for critical user‐server data exchange.

Colin Boyd, Anish Mathuria

Xixiang Lv, Hui Li, Baocang Wang

A recent primitive known as asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) allows a group of users to negotiate a common encryption key which is accessible to any entities and corresponds to different decryption keys, each of which is only computable by one group member. This concept makes it easy to construct distributed and one-round group key agreement protocols. However, this existing instantiation depends on public key infrastructure (PKI) associated with certificate management, or it is only secure against passive adversaries. This paper addresses this concern by designing a certificateless authenticated AGKA scheme, which does not require certificates to guarantee the authenticity of public keys yet avoids the inherent escrow problem of identity-based cryptosystems. Using simple binding techniques, the proposed scheme can be raised to the same trust level as that using the traditional PKI. We show that the proposed protocol is secure provided that the underlying k-bilinear Diffie–Hellman exponent problem is hard.

Mihir Bellare Y, Phillip Rogaway