EIMAKP: Heterogeneous Cross-Domain Authenticated Key Agreement Protocols in the EIM System

Abstract

In recent years, instant messaging (IM) has increasingly become a popular communication technology around the world, and the enterprise instant messaging (EIM) system is one of IM’s applications for enterprise use. The existing studies of EIM systems are directed at the design of functional components and the process of communication, which are usually based on XMPP protocol suite. However, in this paper, the security of EIM is more concerned from another perspective, which is the problem of identity authentication and key agreement between users and services. Several EIM systems are based on public key infrastructure (PKI) to achieve the high-security requirements of enterprises, while identity-based cryptography (IBC) brings new development direction for EIM systems. Although most of the EIM applications are applied independently in different enterprises, users’ heterogeneous cross-domain service access has become an inevitable trend. However, there is still no heterogeneous cross-domain authentication protocol between the PKI domain and the IBC domain having been proposed. Therefore, in order to address this problem, a novel and detailed heterogeneous cross-domain authenticated key agreement scheme is proposed in this paper. By utilizing the PKI-based distributed trust model and the access authorization tickets, this scheme can realize interconnection and seamless authentication between the PKI domain and the IBC domain. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme is theoretically correct, while guaranteeing high security and efficiency.