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International Journal of Communication Systems

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

Zeyad Mohammad

Published Mar 11, 2020• 12 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1002/dac.4386

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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.
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 The SMEN protocol, proposed by Wu and Ustaoglu in 2009, has been considered to be secure as the authors claimed, and numerous theories are proposed based on this protocol. This paper analyzes the SMEN protocol and finds that this protocol is not resistant to the session corruption attack and the key compromise impersonation attack. Then, we propose an improved protocol with tight security reduction. Our improved protocol not only avoids the above attacks but also embraces the same efficiency as the SMEN protocol in terms of exponentiation. Besides, formal analysis of the improved protocol is presented by using the formal automatic security analysis tool Scyther. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We point out the RYY+ identity-based (ID-based) key agreement protocol is vulnerable to Key-compromise impersonation (KCI) attack and Intermediate results leakage (IRL) attack. Then we give the improved protocol which provides KCI and IRL resistance. The novel protocol is provably secure under the gap Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption in the seCK model, which enhances the adversary's queries comparing with previous ID based AKE models. The proposed scheme also has an advantage over most previous schemes on security and efficiency.
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.
Summary Authenticated key exchange protocols represent an important cryptographic mechanism that enables several parties to communicate securely over an open network. Elashry, Mu, and Susilo proposed an identity‐based authenticated key exchange (IBAKE) protocol where different parties establish secure communication by means of their public identities.The authors also introduced a new security notion for IBAKE protocols called resiliency, that is, if the secret shared key is compromised, the entities can generate another shared secret key without establishing a new session between them. They then claimed that their IBAKE protocol satisfies this security notion. We analyze the security of their protocol and prove that it has a major security flaw, which renders it insecure against an impersonation attack. We also disprove the resiliency property of their scheme by proposing an attack where an adversary can compute any shared secret key if just one secret bit is leaked.