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Symmetry

A Key Agreement Protocol Based on a Post-Quantum Identity-Matching Scheme

Yuxia Qian, Yiwen Liang, Lei Shang, Xinqi Dong, Yincheng Liang

Published May 29, 2026• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Key agreement in open networks must not only resist quantum computing threats but also establish keys and authenticate counterparties without explicitly revealing identities. Existing solutions often rely on additional certificates or explicit signature-based authentication or require multiple rounds of interaction and complex state management, thereby imposing burdens on deployment and scalability. To address this, we propose a key agreement protocol based on a post-quantum identity-matching scheme, which unifies identity binding, implicit authentication, and session key establishment into a single key agreement process. Specifically, the initiator generates a ciphertext based on the peer’s identity and embeds session-related information within it, enabling the recipient to verify the peer’s identity and confirm the consistency of the key while decrypting and recovering the shared material. Additionally, bidirectional confirmation messages are used to eliminate negotiation deviations such as the sharing of unknown keys. Furthermore, a version control mechanism is introduced as a synchronization tag for key evolution, allowing the session key to be naturally updated within a predetermined time window. Concurrently, a revocation list maintained by a blockchain is established, enabling distributed verification and auditing of revocation status. This supports key update and revocation management without increasing the number of negotiation rounds. Performance evaluations and security analyses indicate that the protocol incurs a single-end computational overhead of less than 100 μs and a communication overhead of approximately 17.1 KB, trading moderate performance overhead for strong security semantics.

DOI
10.3390/sym18060936

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Key agreement in open networks must not only resist quantum computing threats but also establish keys and authenticate counterparties without explicitly revealing identities. Existing solutions often rely on additional certificates or explicit signature-based authentication or require multiple rounds of interaction and complex state management, thereby imposing burdens on deployment and scalability. To address this, we propose a key agreement protocol based on a post-quantum identity-matching scheme, which unifies identity binding, implicit authentication, and session key establishment into a single key agreement process. Specifically, the initiator generates a ciphertext based on the peer’s identity and embeds session-related information within it, enabling the recipient to verify the peer’s identity and confirm the consistency of the key while decrypting and recovering the shared material. Additionally, bidirectional confirmation messages are used to eliminate negotiation deviations such as the sharing of unknown keys. Furthermore, a version control mechanism is introduced as a synchronization tag for key evolution, allowing the session key to be naturally updated within a predetermined time window. Concurrently, a revocation list maintained by a blockchain is established, enabling distributed verification and auditing of revocation status. This supports key update and revocation management without increasing the number of negotiation rounds. Performance evaluations and security analyses indicate that the protocol incurs a single-end computational overhead of less than 100 μs and a communication overhead of approximately 17.1 KB, trading moderate performance overhead for strong security semantics.
In emerging environments such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), secure authentication and key negotiation play a crucial role in protecting data transmitted over public networks. However, many existing authentication protocols are still designed based on classical public-key cryptography primitives, and quantum computing may threaten their security. To address this challenge, we propose a post-quantum authentication and key agreement protocol that uses the lattice-based Kyber key encapsulation mechanism (KEM). Our proposed protocol integrates cryptographic authentication, smart card protection, and post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms, enabling mutual authentication between users and servers and securely establishing session keys. The security of the protocol is formally analyzed in the Real-or-Random (ROR) model under the random oracle assumption and the IND-CCA security of the underlying KEM scheme. Furthermore, through informal security analysis, we have further demonstrated that the protocol possesses important security properties, including anonymity, untraceability, perfect forward confidentiality, and resistance to known attacks. In addition, the computational cost and communication overhead of the proposed scheme are evaluated and compared with several representative authentication protocols. The results show that the proposed protocol can provide strong security while maintaining low computational cost and communication overhead.
Authenticated key agreement protocol is used to set up the session key and establish secure channel for network communication in the open environment. So far, great deals of identity-based protocols have been proposed to provide robust mutual authentication and key establishment in the two-party setting. Majority of the existing identity-based key agreement protocols require expensive bilinear pairing operation and only provide limited security attributes. Therefore, such protocols are unsuitable for real-world applications that require stronger sense of secrecy. In this paper, we first analysis some of the schemes proposed recently, and then present a one-round ID-based authenticated key agreement protocol with enhanced security attributes, which doesn't need pairing operation and achieves most of the required security attributes, such as known-key secrecy, perfect forward secrecy, PKG Forward Secrecy, key-compromise impersonation resilience, unknown key-share resilience and no key control. In addition, it captures the enhanced security attributes-Known session-specific temporary key information secrecy.
The rise of Web 3.0 has propelled the Internet to new heights of development. However, post-quantum protocols are in high demand to ensure the utmost security to keep pace with the advancements. Our solution is upgrading the traditional synchronous authenticated identity identification and key agreement protocol. Specifically, we have developed an asymmetric key version of the quantum-safe Needham-Schroeder protocol. The proposed protocol achieves forward secrecy, which the classical Needham-Schroeder lacks. Using the highly flexible universal composability framework (iUC), we have analyzed the security of the protocol and achieved mutual authentication and session key security for an unbounded number of sessions. Our informal security analysis confirms that the proposed protocol resists known attacks such as replay and masquerading. Besides, it satisfies security goals, including known-key secrecy and ephemeral secret key leakage. Our modular solution can upgrade practical applications that rely on the traditional Needham-Schroeder protocol and its derivatives to the post-quantum era.
To meet the requirement of doctors’ comprehensive diagnosis and treatment across multiple servers in smart healthcare, and to address the lack of efficient switching mechanisms in existing post-quantum authentication schemes, a post-quantum password authentication and fast-switching key agreement protocol for multi-server smart healthcare environments was proposed. With ML-KEM as the core cryptographic primitive, a mechanism combining initial authentication and fast switching authentication was designed. In the initial authentication phase, full authentication was performed, and a master session key and a service session key were established. During multi-server access, fast switching authentication was performed, and a new service session key was independently negotiated with the target server. In terms of security, the session key semantic security of the proposed protocol was proved under the ROR model, and resistance to common attacks was analyzed. In terms of performance, when a user continuously accessed five servers, compared with the repeated full-authentication approach in Wen’s and Chen’s post-quantum schemes, the proposed protocol reduced the cumulative computational overhead by more than 70.34% and the cumulative communication overhead by more than 27.53%. The performance gap increases as the number of servers grows, which shows that the proposed protocol has significant efficiency advantages and good scalability in large-scale deployment scenarios.
In an open and distributed environment, authenticated key agreement protocol, as an important cryptographic primitive, is used to authenticate entities and establish session key in order to provide secure communications. Key escrow is essential in situations where confidentiality and audit trail are legal requirements, whilst perfect forward secrecy and known session-specific temporary information secrecy attributes are desirable to provide stronger security. In this paper, we give a cryptanalysis on the scheme due to Wang et al., which is based on the identity-based encryption scheme proposed by Gentry (Eurocrypt'06), and then present an enhanced secure two-party identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol. The new proposed protocol achieves most of the required security attributes and can be used properly in the escrow mode. Security analysis shows that it achieves the attributes of known-key secrecy, key-compromise impersonation resilience, unknown key-share resilience and no key control. In addition, it captures the perfect forward secrecy and known session-specific temporary information secrecy attributes.
When quantum computers become practical the traditional cryptographic systems will need replacement because they cannot protect against quantum attacks. We present QUBE-Crypto as our innovative hybrid cryptographic solution made of multiple protection methods which blend Quantum Key Distribution with post-quantum digital signatures and blockchain technology plus pseudorandom quantum state security challenges. QUBE-Crypto offers QUBE-AUTH as a protocol to secure quantum identity verification and communication processes. The system verifies authentications unbreakably through quantum behaviors and protects communication with Dilithium-5 digital signatures plus blockchain time stamps. QUBE-Crypto offers simple hardware setups and matches the 5 G and 6 G networks which makes it workable across different internet-of-things devices plus lets users send private messages safely and set up digital services without a central authority.