Modeling Key Compromise Impersonation Attacks on Group Key Exchange Protocols.

M. Choudary Gorantla, Colin Boyd, Juan Manuel González Nieto

Published Jan 1, 2009• 0 citations

Abstract

Two-party key exchange (2PKE) protocols have been rigorously analyzed under various models considering different adversarial actions. However, the analysis of group key exchange (GKE) protocols has not been as extensive as that of 2PKE protocols. Particularly, an important security attribute called key compromise impersonation (KCI) resilience has been completely ignored for the case of GKE protocols. Informally, a protocol is said to provide KCI resilience if the compromise of the long-term secret key of a protocol participant A does not allow the adversary to impersonate an honest participant B to A. In this paper, we argue that KCI resilience for GKE protocols is at least as important as it is for 2PKE protocols. Our first contribution is revised definitions of security for GKE protocols considering KCI attacks by both outsider and insider adversaries. We also give a new proof of security for an existing two-round GKE protocol under the revised security definitions assuming random oracles. We then show how to achieve insider KCIR in a generic way using a known compiler in the literature. As one may expect, this additional security assurance comes at the cost of an extra round of communication. Finally, we show that a few existing protocols are not secure against outsider KCI attacks. The attacks on these protocols illustrate the necessity of considering KCI resilience for GKE protocols.

Related papers

Modeling key compromise impersonation attacks on group key exchange protocols

M. Choudary Gorantla, Colin Boyd, Juan Manuel González Nieto +1 more

Two-party key exchange (2PKE) protocols have been rigorously analyzed under various models considering different adversarial actions. However, the analysis of group key exchange (GKE) protocols has not been as extensive as that of 2PKE protocols. Particularly, an important security attribute called key compromise impersonation (KCI) resilience has been completely ignored for the case of GKE protocols. Informally, a protocol is said to provide KCI resilience if the compromise of the long-term secret key of a protocol participant A does not allow the adversary to impersonate an honest participant B to A . In this paper, we argue that KCI resilience for GKE protocols is at least as important as it is for 2PKE protocols. Our first contribution is revised definitions of security for GKE protocols considering KCI attacks by both outsider and insider adversaries. We also give a new proof of security for an existing two-round GKE protocol under the revised security definitions assuming random oracles. We then show how to achieve insider KCIR in a generic way using a known compiler in the literature. As one may expect, this additional security assurance comes at the cost of an extra round of communication. Finally, we show that a few existing protocols are not secure against outsider KCI attacks. The attacks on these protocols illustrate the necessity of considering KCI resilience for GKE protocols.

ACM Transactions on Information and System SecurityDec 26, 200825 citations

Design and analysis of group key exchange protocols

M. Choudary Gorantla

A group key exchange (GKE) protocol allows a set of parties to agree upon a common secret session key over a public network. In this thesis, we focus on designing efficient GKE protocols using public key techniques and appropriately revising security models for GKE protocols. For the purpose of modelling and analysing the security of GKE protocols we apply the widely accepted computational complexity approach. The contributions of the thesis to the area of GKE protocols are manifold. We propose the first GKE protocol that requires only one round of communication and is proven secure in the standard model. Our protocol is generically constructed from a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM). We also suggest an efficient KEM from the literature, which satisfies the underlying security notion, to instantiate the generic protocol. We then concentrate on enhancing the security of one-round GKE protocols. A new model of security for forward secure GKE protocols is introduced and a generic one-round GKE protocol with forward security is then presented. The security of this protocol is also proven in the standard model. We also propose an efficient forward secure encryption scheme that can be used to instantiate the generic GKE protocol. Our next contributions are to the security models of GKE protocols. We observe that the analysis of GKE protocols has not been as extensive as that of two-party key exchange protocols. Particularly, the security attribute of key compromise impersonation (KCI) resilience has so far been ignored for GKE protocols. We model the security of GKE protocols addressing KCI attacks by both outsider and insider adversaries. We then show that a few existing protocols are not secure against KCI attacks. A new proof of security for an existing GKE protocol is given under the revised model assuming random oracles. Subsequently, we treat the security of GKE protocols in the universal composability (UC) framework. We present a new UC ideal functionality for GKE protocols capturing the security attribute of contributiveness. An existing protocol with minor revisions is then shown to realize our functionality in the random oracle model. Finally, we explore the possibility of constructing GKE protocols in the attribute-based setting. We introduce the concept of attribute-based group key exchange (AB-GKE). A security model for AB-GKE and a one-round AB-GKE protocol satisfying our security notion are presented. The protocol is generically constructed from a new cryptographic primitive called encapsulation policy attribute-based KEM (EP-AB-KEM), which we introduce in this thesis. We also present a new EP-AB-KEM with a proof of security assuming generic groups and random oracles. The EP-AB-KEM can be used to instantiate our generic AB-GKE protocol.

Faculty of Science and Technology; Information Security InstituteJan 1, 20101 citation

Enhancing CK-Model for Key Compromise Impersonation Resilience and Identity-based Key Exchange.

Robert W. Zhu, Xiaojian Tian, Duncan S. Wong

Abstract. In 2001, Canetti and Krawczyk proposed a security model (CKmodel) for authentication protocols. They also gave an indistinguishabilitybased definition for key exchange protocols. Since then the model has almost exclusively been used for analyzing key exchange protocols, although it can be applied to authentication protocols in general. The model not only captures a large class of attacks but also provides a modular approach to the design of authentication protocols. However, the model does not capture the property of Key Compromise Impersonation (KCI) Resilience. Until now, analysis concerning this property has mostly been done heuristically and restricted to key exchange protocols only. Previous attempts on formalizing KCI have mostly been done in some ad hoc manner and additional proofs have to be given specifically for the security of KCI resilience. In this paper, we propose an extension to the CK-model, which allows, for the first time, the KCI attacks to be considered in authentication protocols in general, rather than restricted to key exchange protocols, and no more additional proofs are required specifically for KCI security. With the revival of interest in identity-based (ID-based) cryptography, there have been many new ID-based key exchange protocols proposed. Despite the fact that some of them have been proven in some restricted versions of a model proposed by Bellare and Rogaway in 1993 and some others have been proven in the original CK-model, there is no rigorous model specifically for ID-based key exchange security. In particular, forward secrecy against compromised Key Generation Server (KGS-FS) has never been captured even though this notion is more important and stronger than the perfect forward secrecy in ID-based key exchange. For this, we further extend our model to ID-based setting and capture the property of KGS-FS for ID-based key exchange security. 1

Jan 1, 20055 citations

Generic One Round Group Key Exchange in the Standard Model.

M. Choudary Gorantla, Colin Boyd, Juan Manuel González Nieto +1 more

Abstract. Minimizing complexity of group key exchange (GKE) protocols is an important milestone towards their practical deployment. An interesting approach to achieve this goal is to simplify the design of GKE protocols by using generic building blocks. In this paper we investigate the possibility of founding GKE protocols based on a primitive called multi key encapsulation mechanism (mKEM) and describe advantages and limitations of this approach. In particular, we show how to design a one-round GKE protocol which satisfies the classical requirement of authenticated key exchange (AKE) security, yet without forward secrecy. As a result, we obtain the first one-round GKE protocol secure in the standard model. We also conduct our analysis using recent formal models that take into account both outsider and insider attacks as well as the notion of key compromise impersonation resilience (KCIR). In contrast to previous models we show how to model both outsider and insider KCIR within the definition of mutual authentication. Our analysis additionally implies that the insider security compiler by Katz and Shin from ACM CCS 2005 can be used to achieve more than what is shown in the original work, namely both outsider and insider KCIR.

Open Research (University of Surrey)Jan 1, 20090 citations

Impersonation Attack on Two Identity-Based Authenticated Key Exchange Protocols

Shiwu Zhang, Qingfeng Cheng, Xuekui Wang

In 2009, Holbl et al. proposed two new identity-based authenticated key exchange protocols and claimed that their protocols can withstand various attacks. In this paper, we will show that Holbl et al.'s protocols cannot resist basic impersonation attack. It also means that their protocols are vulnerable to key compromise impersonation (KCI) attacks. Furthermore, we propose improvements of their protocols with impersonation attack resilience and KCI resilience.

WASE International Conference on Information EngineeringAug 1, 20107 citations

Securing group key exchange against strong corruptions and key registration attacks

Emmanuel Bresson, Mark Manulis

In Group Key Exchange (GKE) protocols, users usually extract the group key using some auxiliary (ephemeral) secret information generated during the execution. Strong corruptions are attacks by which an adversary can reveal these ephemeral secrets, in addition to the possibly used long-lived keys. Undoubtedly, security impact of strong corruptions is serious, and thus specifying appropriate security requirements and designing secure GKE protocols appears an interesting yet challenging task – the aim of our article. We start by investigating the current setting of strong corruptions and derive some refinements like opening attacks that allow to reveal ephemeral secrets of users without their long-lived keys. This allows to consider even stronger attacks against honest, but 'opened' users. Further, we define strong security goals for GKE protocols in the presence of such powerful adversaries and propose a 3-round GKE protocol, named TDH1, which remains immune to their attacks under standard cryptographic assumptions. Our security definitions allow adversaries to register users and specify their long-lived keys, thus, in particular capture attacks of malicious insiders for the appropriate security goals such as Mutual Authentication, key confirmation, contributiveness, key control and key-replication resilience.

International Journal of Applied CryptographyJan 1, 200813 citations