Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol Research Articles

Analysis of Biometric-Based Cryptographic Key Exchange Protocols—BAKE and BRAKE

Biometric authentication methods offer high-quality mechanisms to confirm the identity of individuals in security systems commonly used in the modern world, such as physical access control, online banking, or mobile device unlocking. They also find their application in cryptographic solutions, which allow the biometrically authenticated exchange of cryptographic keys between users and services on the internet, despite the fuzziness of biometric data. Such solutions are BAKE (biometrics-authenticated key exchange) and BRAKE (biometric-resilient authenticated key exchange) protocols, upon which our work is based. However, the direct application of fuzzy biometrics in cryptography, which relies heavily on the accuracy of single-bit secret values, is not trivial. Therefore, this paper is devoted to analyzing the security of this idea and the feasibility of implementing biometric AKE (authenticated key exchange) protocols, with an emphasis on the BRAKE protocol. As the results of our analysis, we discuss BRAKE’s limitations and vulnerabilities, which need to be appropriately addressed to implement the protocol in modern systems.

Provably Secure and Lightweight Authentication Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Meters

Smart Grid is an indispensable part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and has the potential to revolutionise the electricity energy industry. Smart meters, as an important component of Smart Grid, are responsible for the exchange of information between end consumers and service providers. Smart meters and service providers need to use authentication key exchange protocols (AKE) to establish a secure session for secure information transmission. However, The current state-of-the-art lightweight solutions do not support identity anonymity and mostly have high communication costs. This paper proposes a lightweight and secure mutual authentication scheme, which is particularly designed for devices with limited computing capability to provide identity anonymity such as smart meters, based on the Shangyong Mima 2 (SM2) AKE protocol stipulated by the State Cryptography Administration of China. We conducted formal analysis of the security of the proposed scheme and proved its security. In addition, the computational overhead of the protocol was evaluated through performance analysis. Compared with related lightweight protocols, our scheme can reduce up to 30%-40% computational overhead. The results verified that the proposed scheme is indeed suitable for secure communication involving devices with constrained computing capability.

Authenticated Key Exchange under Bad Randomness, Revisited

A bad randomness may cause catastrophic results in security; thus, it is of importance to make cryptographic systems secure against bad randomness. In this paper, we focus on a practical situation where an adversary is able to force participants in an authenticated key exchange (AKE) system to reuse the random values and the functions of these values, called related randomness attack (RRA). Following the existing randomness resetting security model of AKE and the RRA security model of public-key encryption, we present a model of RRA security for authenticated key exchange, as well as the necessary restrictions on the related randomness functions used to obtain the security definition. Then we show how a related randomness attack adversary breaks the security of some existing AKE protocols, and propose some constructions of RRA-secure authenticated key exchange in the random oracle model and standard model, respectively.

Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol in the Standard Model under Weaker Assumptions

A two-party authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol allows each of the two parties to share a common secret key over insecure channels, even in the presence of active adversaries who can actively control and modify the exchanged messages. To capture the malicious behaviors of the adversaries, there have been many efforts to define security models. Amongst them, the extended Canetti–Krawczyk (eCK) security model is considered one of the strongest security models and has been widely adopted. In this paper, we present a simple construction of a pairing-based eCK-secure AKE protocol in the standard model. Our protocol can be instantiated with a suitable signature scheme (i.e., an existentially unforgeable signature scheme against adaptive chosen message attacks). The underlying assumptions of our construction are the decisional bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption and the existence of a pseudorandom function. Note that the previous eCK-secure protocol constructions either relied on random oracles for their security or used somewhat strong assumptions, such as the existence of strong-pseudorandom functions, target collision-resistant functions, etc., while our protocol construction uses fewer and more-standard assumptions in the standard model. Furthermore, preserving the same security argument, our protocol can be instantiated with any appropriate signature scheme that comes in the future with better efficiency.

“Password Authentication Key Exchange Protocol using Fish Tank Image based True Random Number Generator”

Abstract: We employ a straightforward configuration of a fish tank as the changeable environment, recording its photos over time, in order to limit the computational complexity. To create the initial seed, the image data is then submitted to a reduction method and hash function. In order to get true random numbers, we suggest a method for economically removing the true seed from the image data and applying it to a pseudo-random generator, in this case, a Linear Congruential Generator (LCG). The need for information security is increasing across a range of industries, and security concerns are receiving more and more attention as a result of the Internet's explosive growth in recent years. Any future value cannot be accurately anticipated based on the current set of values and random numbers are those that are a part of a sequence in which values are uniformly distributed over a defined set. A safe session key can be provided to a pair of users interacting over an unstable channel using password-based encrypted key exchange protocols, even if the top secret key or password they share is chosen at random from a tiny set of values. We offer two straightforward Bellovin and Merritt-based encrypted key exchange systems..

Classification and analysis of vulnerabilities of modern information systems from classical and quantum attacks

Recent advances in quantum technology and the potential that practical quantum computers may become a reality in the future have led to renewed interest in developing cryptographic technologies that are secure against conventional and quantum attacks. Currently, virtually all asymmetric cryptographic schemes in use are threatened by the potential development of powerful quantum computers. Post-quantum cryptography is one of main the ways to combat this threat. Its security is based on the complexity of mathematical problems that are currently considered unsolvable efficiently, even with the help of quantum computers. The security of information systems is ensured through protection against various threats that use system vulnerabilities. Security protocols are the building blocks of secure communication. They implement security mechanisms to provide security services. Security protocols are considered abstract when analyzed, but may have additional vulnerabilities in implementation. This work contains a holistic study of security protocols. Basics of security protocols, taxonomy of attacks on security protocols and their implementation are considered, as well as various methods and models of protocol security analysis. In particular, the differences between information-theoretic and computational security, computational and symbolic models are specified. In addition, an overview of the computational security models for Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) and Password Authentication Key Exchange (PAKE) protocols is provided. The most important security models for the AKE and PAKE protocols were also described. With the emergence of new technologies that may have different security requirements, as well as with increased opportunities for competition, there is always a need to develop new protocols. Thus, the purpose of this article is to review, classify, analyze, and research the vulnerabilities of information systems from classical, quantum, and special attacks, performed taking into account the forecast regarding the possibilities of attacks on post-quantum cryptographic transformations; studying security assessment models for existing cryptographic protocols, as well as reviewing and benchmarking security models and providing suggestions for protection against existing potential attacks.

ETP-AKEP Enhanced Three Party Authenticated Key Exchange Protocols for Data Integrity in Cloud Environments

With key exchange protocols, a secure session key is generated between two remote users and servers and exchanged between them. It is generally used to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to sensitive data. This article presents an enhanced three party authenticated key exchange protocols (ETP-AKE) protocol that does not depend on symmetric key encryption and instead uses asymmetric key encryption. A key component of the proposed ETP-AKE protocol is using elliptic curve encryption in conjunction with a one-way hash function. Its integrity certification was confirmed via the usage of the AVISPA tool package. The proposed protocol is intended to protect against various security threats, including the man-in-the-middle assault, the parallel attack, and the key-compromise attack, among others.

Improved anonymity preserving three-party mutual authentication key exchange protocol based on chaotic maps

Three-party authentication key exchange is a protocol that allows two users to set up a session key for encrypted communication by the help of a trusted remote server. Providing user anonymity and mutual authentication in the authentication key exchange is important security requirements to protect users’ privacy and enhance its security performance. Recently Li proposed a chaotic maps-based authentication key exchange protocol which attempts to provide mutual authentication and user anonymity, but we found that there were some faults in the key exchange phase and password change phase of his scheme. We prove that Li’s scheme does not provide user anonymity and that the user’s privacy information is disclosed, and propose enhanced three-party authentication key exchange protocol that provides user anonymity and we analyse its security properties and verify its validity based on BAN logic and AVISPA tool.

DAKEs: Decentralized Authenticated Key Exchange Protocols via Blockchain for Smart City

Authenticated key exchange (AKE) is a classic problem in cryptography, where two participants want to exchange their secret keys without being guessed feasibly. Recently, there has been renewed interest in this problem in the smart city since millions of devices and servers in this environment may involve the problem. New challenges are raised at the same time. One of the greatest challenges is how to facilitate communication between participants. Traditionally, a trusted third party (TTP) is needed to provide a trusted way to exchange keys. However, devices in the smart city environment are usually distributed and trustless. A central trusted mechanism is not suitable for many applications in it. The second challenge is that the requirements in the applications of the smart city are diverse. Finally, a practical AKE protocol should be efficient and easy to integrate. To address these challenges, we provide a fully decentralized AKE protocol framework called DAKEs. To the best of our knowledge, DAKEs enjoy the most comprehensive security properties to fulfil diverse requirements. The decentralization of DAKEs is captured by using the blockchain while avoiding the availability problem of other similar blockchain-based schemes. Our test is conducted in a real-world test network of Ethereum. The result shows that DAKEs are efficient and at a low cost.

ECK-Secure Authenticated Key Exchange against Auxiliary Input Leakage

Abstract Authenticated key exchange protocols are quite important primitives for practical applications, since they enable two parties to generate a shared high entropy secret key. In this paper we mainly focus on the authenticated key exchange (AKE) against auxiliary input leakage. As the major contribution of this work, we present a generic framework for the construction of AKE protocols that are secure against auxiliary input leakage. An instantiation based on the generalized decisional Diffie-Hellman (GDDH) assumption in the standard model is also given to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed framework. We also give a comparison among the existing leakage resilient AKE protocols with auxiliary inputs.

Secure authenticated key exchange for WSNs in IoT applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the key technological building block of Internet of Things (IoT), by which remote users can access the real-time data from the sensor nodes. Due to the openness and mobility of such network, it is essential to establish secure links for end-to-end communication with proper authentication. Although amount of research works in this area have been made, so far designing a secure and efficient authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol for this setting is still an open topic. So, the authors in this paper design a two-factor AKE protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for WSNs in the context of IoT, allowing the end users and sensor nodes to exchange information directly after a secure link is established with the help of the corresponding gateway node. The heuristic security analysis has shown that the new protocol can provide various expected security attributes and resist various known attacks. Moreover, the performance study states that the new protocol is efficient enough and has certain efficiency advantages in the aspects of computation and communication costs compared with the same type of ECC-based AKE protocols for IoT applications.

3P-SAKE: Privacy-preserving and physically secured authenticated key establishment protocol for wireless industrial networks

A new industrial revolution is emerging with the Internet of Things (IoT) growing use in enabling the machine to machine communication between the devices, sensors, actuators, and gateways. IoT lets the communication across devices and the network happen in real-time and helps make technologically smart homes, smart hospitals, and smart industrial applications. The authentication schemes in IoT have to be robust and lightweight to be useful for resource-constrained real-time applications where user privacy and physical security are the priority concerns. The IoT devices are prone to physical attacks due to their installation in hostile environments. The intruders want to physically capture the IoT nodes for cloning and accessing the stored confidential information, thus necessitating IoT nodes’ physical protection. This article proposes a less expensive and physically secured user authentication and secure key exchange protocol for industry 4.0 applications. Physically unclonable functions (PUF), hash, and XOR operations are used in the proposed method to attain robustness and efficiency. The scheme’s other benefits include low computational cost, retaining the device’s confidentiality, safety from major security threats, low communication, and storage overhead.

Securing the controller area network with covert voltage channels

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is the most widely employed communication protocol for in-vehicle applications. While many of its features qualify it as a suitable candidate for future use in automotive networking, the lack of security mechanisms makes it problematic for safety-critical applications. Recently, both the research community and the industry have proposed a large number of solutions for securing CAN, but most of these solutions put additional strain on the already limited 8 byte CAN payload or require more expensive hardware. In this work, we propose the use of a covert voltage channel that can be used for the transmission of additional data required by specific security mechanisms. We achieve this with the help of additional transceivers by encoding additional bits as different voltage levels in the existing CAN dominant bits without affecting regular CAN traffic decoding. We demonstrate the application of our approach on both low-end and high-end automotive embedded platforms and prove its suitability for implementing authentication mechanisms and key exchange protocols over CAN while maintaining backward compatibility.

A highly secure three-party authentication key exchange protocol and its application in e-business communication with ECK model

Since for the e-business development, users sometimes need to share sensitive personal information through a public network, they do not want their privacy information revealed by the malicious attackers. In 2007, LaMacchia et al. proposed a two-party authentication key exchange (2PAKE) protocol under the security assumption of extended Canetti-Krawczyk (ECK) model. Although the ECK model is well designed to guarantee security in a two-party key exchange, it is not suitable in several other real situations with more parties, such as in auction, space communication, and internet of things (IoT), among others. Considering these problems, we first propose several ECK-based three-party authentication key exchange protocols, which provide personal privacy security protection and increase the usability of the authentication key exchange protocols. We also discuss three cases in different application environments. Moreover, the pairing operations are used in some cases if the application situations require less communication steps.

PUF Based Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for IoT Without Verifiers and Explicit CRPs

A Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) provides a physical device a unique output for a given input, which can be regarded as the device’s digital fingerprint. Thus, PUFs can provide unique identities for billions of connected devices in Internet of Things (IoT) architectures. Plenty of PUF based authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols have been proposed. However, most of them are designed for the authentication between an IoT node and the specific server/verifier, whom the IoT node registered with. Only a few of them are designed for the authentication between IoT nodes, and all these protocols need verifiers or explicit Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs). In this paper, we propose the first PUF based AKE protocol for IoT without verifiers and explicit CRPs, which IoT nodes can freely authenticate each other and create a session key on their own without the help of any server or verifier. We compare the proposed protocol with 27 relevant PUF based AKE protocols to show the superiority, and analyze the computational cost of each entity in the proposed protocol to show the efficiency. We define the adversarial model of a PUF based AKE protocol for IoT and formally prove the security of the proposed protocol in random oracle model. The security of the proposed protocol is based on the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm (ECDL), Elliptic Curve Computational Diffie-Hellman (ECCDH), and Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumptions.

A highly secure three-party authentication key exchange protocol and its application in e-business communication with ECK model

A highly secure three-party authentication key exchange protocol and its application in e-business communication with ECK model

A Novel Quantum Dragonfly Multi-Key Exchange Protocol beyond Conventional Attacks

Dragonfly Key Exchange Protocol (DFKEP) is a kind of simple authentication key exchange protocol based on low-entropy shared password between two nodes, aiming to construct an efficient and secure scheme with better user experience for guarding security for internet era. Furthermore, DFKEP has been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force as a candidate standard for general internet use. Unfortunately, the original DFKEP has some flaws, such as vulnerable to off-line guessing attack and kinds of passive and active attacks. Combining quantum technology, this paper presents an enhanced DFKEP, called Quantum Dragonfly Multi-key Exchange Protocol (QDFMKEP), which can eliminate DFKEP’s flaws and output multiple session keys in one transaction. Moreover, compared with the former research AQKDPs (authenticated quantum key distribution protocols) and DFKEP, QDFMKEP has four merits: (1) the basis is dynamic against the long shared password revealed, (2) key agreement replaces key distribution for eliminating the server get the session key of the two users, (3) any user’s device need not store information for saving storage space and avoiding verification table leakage, and s/he only keep the password in her/his brain, (4) output multiple session keys. Compared with the related literatures recently, our proposed scheme can not only own high efficiency and unique functionality, but is also robust to various attacks and achieves perfect forward secrecy. Finally, we give the security proof and the comparison with the related works.

An Efficient Leakage-Resilient Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol Suitable for IoT Devices

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.

Tightly‐secure two‐pass authenticated key exchange protocol using twin Diffie–Hellman problem

Tight security is an important requirement of practical cryptographic schemes. Compared with loosely-secure schemes, tightly-secure schemes allow shorter security parameters hence are more efficient. In CRYPTO 2018, Gjosteen and Jager proposed a tightly-secure authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol. They used ‘commitment trick’ to construct a tight security reduction for their protocol. However, this technique leads to a three-pass execution in their protocol, and their protocol cannot achieve key confirmation unless it is modified to have a four-pass execution. In this study, the authors propose a tightly-secure two-pass AKE protocol. They use the twin Diffie–Hellman problem and the ‘re-patch’ trick of random oracles to construct a tight security reduction for their protocol. This technique allows their protocol to have a two-pass execution. Their protocol provides several security properties such as key-compromise-impersonation security, unknown-key-share security, and weak perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, a three-pass variant of their protocol provides key confirmation.

MAKE-IT-A Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things.

Continuous development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has opened up enormous opportunities for the engineers to enhance the efficiency of the machines. Despite the development, many industry administrators still fear to use Internet for operating their machines due to untrusted nature of the communication channel. The utilization of internet for managing industrial operations can be widespread adopted if the authentication of the entities are performed and trust is ensured. The traditional schemes with their inherent security issues and other complexities, cannot be directly deployed to resource constrained network devices. Therefore, we have proposed a strong mutual authentication and secret key exchange protocol to address the vulnerabilities of the existing schemes. We have used various cryptography operations such as hashing, ciphering, and so forth, for providing secure mutual authentication and secret key exchange between different entities to restrict unauthorized access. Performance and security analysis clearly demonstrates that the proposed work is energy efficient (computation and communication inexpensive) and more robust against the attacks in comparison to the traditional schemes.