Authenticated key exchange (AKE) allows two parties to authenticate each other and establish a secret session key to build a secure channel, and it has been well studied in the literature. With the approaching of quantum computers, designing post-quantum secure AKE schemes becomes an urgent task. Today, several KE schemes have been proposed while only a small number of AKE schemes exist. Very few of them have considered resource-constrained participants like IoT devices. In this paper, assuming a typical client-server setting where the client is an IoT device, we propose a modular framework that converts any post-quantum secure KE scheme into a post-quantum secure AKE scheme. Equipped with two authentication factors, the resulted AKE scheme provides a number of security guarantees including Perfect forward secrecy (PFS), Key compromise impersonation (KCI) resilience and Server compromise impersonation (SCI) resilience. We further instantiate the framework by selecting the most efficient KE scheme, namely NewHope Compact, and implement the scheme with some optimisation techniques and conduct relevant analysis and comparisons. In a nutshell, the computational time of the server side is 1.11 ms on a PC and 6.22 ms of the IoT device simulated on Raspberry Pi 3B+, and it seems to be efficient enough for most IoT application scenarios.
Authenticated key exchange (AKE) allows two parties to authenticate each other and establish a secret session key to build a secure channel, and it has been well studied in the literature. With the approaching of quantum computers, designing post-quantum secure AKE schemes becomes an urgent task. Today, several KE schemes have been proposed while only a small number of AKE schemes exist. Very few of them have considered resource-constrained participants like IoT devices. In this paper, assuming a typical client-server setting where the client is an IoT device, we propose a modular framework that converts any post-quantum secure KE scheme into a post-quantum secure AKE scheme. Equipped with two authentication factors, the resulted AKE scheme provides a number of security guarantees including Perfect forward secrecy (PFS), Key compromise impersonation (KCI) resilience and Server compromise impersonation (SCI) resilience. We further instantiate the framework by selecting the most efficient KE scheme, namely NewHope Compact, and implement the scheme with some optimisation techniques and conduct relevant analysis and comparisons. In a nutshell, the computational time of the server side is 1.11 ms on a PC and 6.22 ms of the IoT device simulated on Raspberry Pi 3B+, and it seems to be efficient enough for most IoT application scenarios.
Authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol for client–server environments is a significant cryptographic primitive that provides communication confidentiality and mutual authentication between clients and servers. In an Internet of Things (IoT) environment, clients typically employ IoT devices with limited computing capability to interact with servers through the Internet. Numerous AKE protocols suitable for IoT devices, called AKE-IoT protocols, have been proposed. Recently, side-channel attacks have been conducted to defeat traditional cryptographic protocols because a side-channel adversary can retrieve partial content of long-term or short-term secret keys. Several leakage-resilient AKE (LRAKE) protocols were presented to counteract such attacks. Unfortunately, the existing LRAKE protocols are not suitable for IoT devices because expensive pairing operations are required for client sides. In this article, we propose the first efficient LRAKE protocol suitable for IoT devices, named LRAKE-IoT. By the unbalanced computation method, no pairing operation is required for client sides in our protocol. In the generic bilinear pairing group model, security analysis is conducted to demonstrate the security of the proposed protocol in the continuous-leakage-resilient extended-Canetti–Krawczyk model. Finally, computational experiences on two IoT devices are given to show that the proposed protocol is well-suited for IoT devices.
Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) is a cryptographic protocol to share a common session key among multiple parties. At ISC 2021, Liu, Tang, and Zhou proposed a modular multi-factor AKE framework resilient to a characteristic attack called server compromise impersonation based on big data in the bounded-retrieval model and concrete post-quantum big data-based AKE schemes. They also formulated a security model (LTZ model) that captures perfect forward secrecy, key compromise impersonation, and server compromise impersonation. However, the LTZ model does not consider the compromise of ephemeral secret keys, and their schemes rely on the random oracle model. In this paper, we extend the LTZ model (LTZ-eCK model) to capture the compromise of ephemeral secret keys and propose a generic construction of big data-based AKE resilient to both server compromise impersonation and ephemeral key leakage in the standard model. Our generic construction allows us to achieve the post-quantum big data-based AKE scheme (from isogenies, lattice, etc.) in the LTZ-eCK model without random oracles.
Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) is a cryptographic protocol to share a common session key among multiple parties. Usually, PKI-based AKE schemes are designed to guarantee secrecy of the session key and mutual authentication. However, in practice, there are many cases where mutual authentication is undesirable such as in anonymous networks like Tor and Riffle, or difficult to achieve due to the certificate management at the user level such as the Internet. Goldberg et al. formulated a model of anonymous one-sided AKE which guarantees the anonymity of the client by allowing only the client to authenticate the server, and proposed a concrete scheme. However, existing anonymous one-sided AKE schemes are only known to be secure in the random oracle model. In this paper, we propose generic constructions of anonymous one-sided AKE in the random oracle model and in the standard model, respectively. Our constructions allow us to construct the first post-quantum anonymous one-sided AKE scheme from isogenies in the standard model.
Authentication key exchange protocols enable communication entities to agree on a shared secret value over an insecure public channel. Conventional authentication key exchange protocols rely on mathematical problems that can be broken by Shor's algorithm executed on a quantum computer. This study proposes a quantum-safe authentication protocol that uses the CRYSTALS-Kyber post-quantum cryptographic primitive and Elliptic-Curve Cryptography. The primary application area of the proposed scheme is smart-city infrastructures and resource-constrained environments. This protocol is motivated by the scheme of Parameswarath et al. Their solution lacks perfect forward secrecy and protection against denial-of-service attacks, and it is practically infeasible. The proposed scheme addresses those limitations. The scheme presented in this study was analyzed in the Real-or-Random formal security model. Additionally, the formal security verifier ProVerif was used to verify security properties, including message integrity, strong authentication, and session key secrecy. Moreover, this document includes an informal security analysis that demonstrates a wide range of security features. This study also contains a performance analysis of the proposed scheme along with other recently published schemes. The total computation costs at the IoT device and the Cloud Server are 0.2014 and 0.216 milliseconds, respectively. The storage cost for both the IoT device and the Cloud Server is 2545 bytes. The total communication cost for authentication messages is 1687 bytes. Finally, the presented protocol was simulated using the NS3 network simulator. The measured values for Packet Delivery Ratio, End-to-End delay, and Throughput in a scenario with 40 devices are 99.07\%, 3.54 ms, and 162.92 kbps, respectively.
With the rapid advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, efficient and secure communication is considered a challenging task. Symmetric authenticated key exchange (AKE) is a promising solution due to its lightweight design. However, existing studies have demonstrated that traditional symmetric AKE schemes are unable to achieve perfect forward secrecy (PFS). Although some improved schemes were proposed based on the evolution of long-term secrets, the analysis indicates that there exists a zero-sum trade-off between PFS and self-synchronization. In addition, privacy preservation remains a critical issue. In response, this paper proposes a novel three-party symmetric AKE scheme. Specifically, the secret evolving mechanism to prevent the reverse inference of crucial secret values is constructed in the scheme. Meanwhile, any reachable session state can be self-transferred to the synchronization state at the end of a complete session. The proposed scheme provides anonymity and pseudonym unlinkability to the required party, while also improving the robustness of conditional identity traceability, avoiding false accusations caused by misdirected requests. The formal analysis, heuristic analysis based on the state transition and secrecy dependency, and performance comparison indicate that the proposed scheme achieves essential properties while maintaining manageable overhead.
Objective: To design a secure and efficient three-party post-quantum authenticated key agreement (AKE) protocol that ensures mutual authentication, user anonymity, and forward secrecy, while resisting both classical and quantum adversaries. Methods: The proposed protocol is constructed using the Ring Learning with Errors (Ring-LWE) assumption, which is widely regarded as quantum-resistant. The scheme enables two users to establish a shared session key through a trusted server over an insecure channel. Cryptographic hash functions, lattice-based operations, and masking techniques are employed to achieve authentication, anonymity, and key confidentiality. Formal correctness proofs, informal security analysis, and comparative performance evaluations are conducted to validate the protocol. Findings: The study describes qualitative benefits like "outperforms current protocols" but lacks specific metrics, such as exact computation costs (e.g., 4913 ns total execution) or communication rounds, and "reduces user-side cost to 2438 ns vs. 5395 ns in Islam et al.". Also, substantially more efficient than pairing- or chaotic-map-based protocols, which incur costs exceeding 12000 ns. Communication overhead is reduced by limiting the exchange to two RLWE-based messages and one server response, avoiding expensive bilinear pairing or biometric hash transmissions. These results demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides stronger security guarantees at a lower computational and communication cost, making it suitable for resource-constrained mobile and IoT environments. Novelty: Unlike existing approaches, the proposed protocol simultaneously guarantees user anonymity, forward secrecy, and quantum resistance in a three-party setting based on Ring-LWE. It overcomes known vulnerabilities in prior schemes and achieves improved efficiency without compromising security, making it a practical and robust solution for post-quantum secure communications. Keywords: Key Establishment, Authentication, Ring Learning with Errors, Anonymous Key Exchange, Post Quantum Forward Secrecy