Once the shared secret key is established, three parties can use it for secure communication using symmetric-key encryption AES (128, 192, 256) algorithms or other cryptographic primitives. Although there are few third-party post-quantum authentication and key agreement protocols exist, but the recent studies in this article show that they are not anonymous or cannot provide forward secrecy. Most of the existing protocols enable adversaries to trace the source of messages. Many of third-party AKA schemes based on conventional public-key cryptosystems are vulnerable to quantum computers. Therefore, this paper contains a forward secure three-party post-quantum authenticated key establishment protocol for mobile devices. The proposed three-party key exchange protocol establishes an authenticated shared key that can be periodically refreshed to maintain forward secrecy. This protocol enables two parties to establish a shared session key even in the presence of quantum adversaries and enables them to communicate confidentially and securely over insecure networks. The protocol is anonymous as both the parties communicate using masked dynamic identities. A contrast study consisting of performance and security assessment is presented, which illustrates the suggested design is more applicable.
Once the shared secret key is established, three parties can use it for secure communication using symmetric-key encryption AES (128, 192, 256) algorithms or other cryptographic primitives. Although there are few third-party post-quantum authentication and key agreement protocols exist, but the recent studies in this article show that they are not anonymous or cannot provide forward secrecy. Most of the existing protocols enable adversaries to trace the source of messages. Many of third-party AKA schemes based on conventional public-key cryptosystems are vulnerable to quantum computers. Therefore, this paper contains a forward secure three-party post-quantum authenticated key establishment protocol for mobile devices. The proposed three-party key exchange protocol establishes an authenticated shared key that can be periodically refreshed to maintain forward secrecy. This protocol enables two parties to establish a shared session key even in the presence of quantum adversaries and enables them to communicate confidentially and securely over insecure networks. The protocol is anonymous as both the parties communicate using masked dynamic identities. A contrast study consisting of performance and security assessment is presented, which illustrates the suggested design is more applicable.
ABSTRACT A three‐party post‐quantum key agreement protocol involves server with two communicating parties securely agreeing on a shared secret key in a way that is resistant to quantum attacks. Once the shared secret key is shared using authenticated key agreement protocol, then user (A), and user (B) can use it for securing communication channel using symmetric‐key encryption AES‐256 algorithm. Although there are few third‐party post‐quantum authenticated and key agreement schemes exist, but the recent studies in this paper illustrates that they are not satisfying properties like unlinkability, anonymity, perfect forward secrecy, and signal leakage attacks. Therefore, the proposed protocol ensures anonymity, unlinkablity, perfect forward secrecy, and resistant against signal leakage attacks. The proposed protocol uses different random numbers for each of sessions and ensures freshness of the session key to maintain forward secrecy. In this protocol, the user (A) only communicates with server, and establish an authenticated session key with user (B) which avoids server overheads. The use of ring learning with errors (RLWE) instead of the simpler learning with errors (LWE) is primarily motivated by the need for efficiency, compactness, and scalability in cryptographic applications. A comparative study, including both performance and security assessments, demonstrates that the proposed design is more secure and efficient.
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
In cellular systems, user devices (UEs) establish secure sessions with each other through a trusted server such as the Home Subscriber Server (HSS) or Authentication Center (AuC). The proposed two-party authenticated key establishment allows two users to authenticate and exchange encrypted data with minimal involvement of the server -improving efficiency and scalability in mobile communication. Moreover, this paper presents a cryptanalysis of two post-quantum authentication and key agreement protocols proposed by Dabra et al. and Kumar et al. Our analysis identifies specific weaknesses, a design flaw in the registration phase of Dabra et al.’s protocol, and vulnerabilities to identity guessing and impersonation attacks in Kumar et al.’s scheme. Motivated by these findings, we propose a new communication framework for a two-party authenticated key establishment protocol assisted by a server. In the proposed model, user UA initiates communication by sending a request to a central server and receives a corresponding response to establish an authenticated session key with user UB. Notably, user UB does not need to interact with the server during session initiation or key derivation phases, thereby significantly reducing communication overhead and enhancing efficiency. Through extensive formal analysis and simulation, our protocol achieves 21.37% and 19.99% improvement in computational efficiency and 35.13% and 21.05% reduction in communication overhead compared to the lattice-based authenticated key agreement protocols of Dabra et al. and Kumar et al., respectively. Furthermore, the proposed scheme ensures key freshness, meaning that each session key is unique and has never been used in any prior communication session. This guarantees that every session remains protected by a distinct cryptographic key, even when the same users communicate repeatedly. Additionally, user UA can establish a secure session with user UB without revealing its identity to either UB or any intermediate server, thereby preserving user anonymity. Overall, the proposed protocol offers strong privacy guarantees while enabling secure, authenticated communication with a minimal number of message exchanges.
A three-party authenticated key exchange protocol enables two entities to agree on a session key with the help of a dedicated server over public channel. Shor’s algorithm is a big threat for existing authenticated key exchange protocols. Lattice based cryptography plays a very important role in designing authentication and key agreement secure against the threat of quantum attacks. However, it is not easy job to design quantum resistant password based three party protocol due to the high demand for security requirements and the limited resources nature of mobile devices. In this article, we have proposed a new post quantum three party key exchange based on ring learning with errors assumption. This protocol is motivated from Islam et al.’s authenticated key exchange protocol. Their protocol is not secure against stolen smartcard attack, password guessing attack, and can’t provide user anonymity. The anonymous communication is a big requirement for practical applications like e-healthcare services/smart vehicular communication. This paper also contains the performance analysis of the proposed protocol along with other relevant protocols.
In this paper, we have proposed a two-party authenticated key establishment (AKE), and authenticated key transport protocols based on lattice-based cryptography, aiming to provide security against quantum attacks for secure communication. This protocol enables two parties, who may share long-term public keys, to securely establish a shared session key, and transportation of the session key from the server while achieving mutual authentication. Our construction leverages the hardness of lattice problems Ring Learning With Errors (Ring-LWE), ensuring robustness against quantum and classical adversaries. Unlike traditional schemes whose security depends upon number-theoretic assumptions being vulnerable to quantum attacks, our protocol ensures security in the post-quantum era. The proposed protocol ensures forward secrecy, and provides security even if the long-term key is compromised. This protocol also provides essential property key freshness and resistance against man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation attacks, replay attacks, and key mismatch attacks. On the other hand, the proposed key transport protocol provides essential property key freshness, anonymity, and resistance against man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation attacks, replay attacks, and key mismatch attacks. A two-party key transport protocol is a cryptographic protocol in which one party (typically a trusted key distribution center or sender) securely generates and sends a session key to another party. Unlike key exchange protocols (where both parties contribute to key generation), key transport protocols rely on one party to generate the key and deliver it securely. The protocol possesses a minimum number of exchanged messages and can reduce the number of communication rounds to help minimize the communication overhead.
ABSTRACT In this paper, we introduce a lattice‐based authenticated three‐party key agreement scheme for mobile devices with the aim of achieving both post‐quantum security and efficiency. Our scheme is inspired by the authenticated key exchange protocol developed. We revisit the recently suggested system, which is a communication‐efficient three‐party password‐authenticated key exchange, in which we found that the scheme is not fully correct and also demonstrate that the scheme is not safe from user's anonymity and impersonation assaults. We provide an enhanced scheme that is both effective and resistant to the mentioned assault. We also demonstrate its security in a ROM (Random Oracle Model). A comparison analysis that includes performance, security evaluations, energy consumption, and packet loss rate is also provided, proving the suitability of the suggested design.