Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Protocol Research Articles

Towards improving the security of wireless networks using secured session keys

ABSTRACT Wireless Networks are mostly based on the IEEE 802.11 standards and with so many applications being wireless, without proper security, sensitive information may be at risk. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) are two of the most commonly used mechanisms for implementing security in wireless networks. However, research has shown that both of these can be cracked quite easily within a short period as these mechanisms use a key-based security implementation for performing operations. The key can be found by capturing a few packets and hence security is compromised. In this study, the solution that is proposed by generating a secured session key using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, which is valid only for a specific session and cannot be cracked easily by the intruder, and hence will not affect the security of the entire network. The key exchange is made by the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. The proposed solution was implemented over a network and found to be secure.

Authorization of Aadhar data using Diffie Helman key with enhanced security concerns

In today’s digital era, the security of sensitive data such as Aadhaar data is of utmost importance. To ensure the privacy and integrity of this data, a conceptual framework is proposed that employs the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol and Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) to enhance the security. The proposed system begins with the preprocessing phase, which includes removing noise, standardizing formats and validating the integrity of the data. Next, the data is segmented into appropriate sections to enable efficient storage and retrieval in the cloud. Each segment is further processed to extract meaningful features, ensuring that the relevant information is preserved while reducing the risk of unauthorized access. For safeguarding the stored Aadhaar data, the system employs the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol which allows the data owner and the cloud service provider to establish a shared secret key without exposing it to potential attackers. Additionally, HMAC is implemented to verify the identity of users during the login process. HMAC enhances security by leveraging cryptographic hash functions and a shared secret key to produce a distinct code for each login attempt. This mechanism effectively protects the confidentiality and integrity of stored data. The combination of Diffie-Hellman key exchange and HMAC authentication provides a robust security framework for Aadhaar data. It ensures that the data remains encrypted and inaccessible without the secret key, while also verifying the identity of users during the login process. This comprehensive approach helps preventing unauthorized access thereby protecting against potential attacks, instilling trust and confidence in the security of Aadhaar data stored in the cloud. Results of the article depict that the proposed scheme achieve 0.19 s of encryption time and 0.05 s of decryption time.

An image encryption method based on modified elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol and Hill Cipher

Abstract Digital image protection is crucial since images often contain private and sensitive information in business, medical, and military. One of the best techniques for securing the content of these images is encryption. This article introduces a cryptosystem known as the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman Hill Cipher (ECDHHC) that uses the modified eliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange protocol to generate the shared secret key integrated with the Hill Cipher. An elliptic curve point-based secret shared key matrix using the ECDHHC, which will be used for encryption and decryption, is generated. Thereafter, the input image is split into a set of 8 × 8 submatrices and then changes the values of these matrices by multiplying each block with the secret shared key matrix. The encrypted image is constructed by merging all encrypted blocks. With this combination, the correlation between adjacent pixels in the ciphered image is effectively removed, and the level of unpredictability and uncertainty for the ciphered image is also enhanced. The suggested approach used the key space, entropy, histogram, antinoise attack, differential attack, and correlation coefficient to evaluate the performance of the encryption method. According to simulation findings, the proposed method offers a high level of security and efficiency, and resists attackers.

Privacy Protection Method for Blockchain Transactions Based on the Stealth Address and the Note Mechanism

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that possesses characteristics such as decentralization, tamper resistance, and programmability. However, while blockchain ensures transaction openness and transparency, transaction privacy is also at risk of being exposed. Therefore, this paper proposes the blockchain transaction privacy protection method based on the stealth address and the note mechanism to address the privacy leakage risk in blockchain public environments. Firstly, the proposed method generates a random seed known only to the parties involved based on the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol, ensuring the privacy of transactions. Then, it utilizes the Note Commitments table to maintain the binding relationship between the stealth address and the corresponding note, enabling efficient transfer and verification of note ownership. The uniqueness of the stealth address is utilized as an invalidation identifier for notes in the Nullifier table, ensuring efficient verification of the correctness of note invalidation identifiers. Additionally, this method employs Pedersen commitment and Bulletproofs range proof to generate proof of the legality of transaction amounts, enabling the concealment of transaction amounts and facilitating private transactions between the parties involved. Finally, this paper presents a detailed performance analysis, implementation, and testing of the method. From the results, it can be concluded that the method proposed can effectively prevent fraudulent behavior by various transaction participants and ensure the security, privacy, and integrity of the transaction. Critical processes consume only milliseconds, and the related commitments and proofs are also minimal, which is crucial for controlling transaction costs. At the same time, this method achieves a completely decentralized privacy transaction solution.

Effects of quantum noise on Shor’s algorithm

Shor’s quantum factoring algorithm (Shor’s algorithm) can solve factorization problem of large integers by using a fully-operational quantum computer with the complexity of polynomial-time level, thereby cracking a series of encryption algorithms (such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman encryption algorithm, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol) whose security is guaranteed by factorizing large integers, which is a difficult problem. We are currently in a noisy intermediate-scale quantum era, which means that we can only operate on quantum computers with a limited number of qubits and we have to take care of the effects of quantum noise. Quantum states on a quantum computer are prone to quantum noise caused by low-fidelity gates or interactions between qubits and the environment, which results in inaccurate measurements. We study the influence of quantum noise on Shor’s algorithm through 3 typical quantum noise channels: the depolarizing channel, the state preparation and measurement channel, and the thermal relaxation channel. We successfully simulate the factorization of the numbers 15, 21, and 35 into their corresponding prime factors by using the quantum circuit we have constructed on a classical computer. Then we simulate a running quantum circuit of Shor’s algorithm in a noisy environment with different level of noise for a certain type of noise channel and present numerical results. We can obtain precise measurements by calculating the state vector prior to measurement, instead of simulating and measuring expending much time, which contributes to higher efficiency. Each experiment is repeated 1000 times to reduce discrepancy. Our research indicates that Shor’s algorithm is easily affected by quantum noise. Successful rate of Shor’s algorithm decreases exponentially with the increase of noise level in the depolarizing channel, where the successful rate is an indicator we propose in this research to quantify the influence of noise on Shor’s algorithm, meanwhile the noise in the state preparation and measurement channel and the thermal relaxation channel can linearly affect the successful rate of Shor’s algorithm. There are <inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$O(n^4) $\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="5-20231414_M1.jpg"/><graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="5-20231414_M1.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula> quantum gates in the circuit, each of which is disrupted by noise in depolarizing channel during running the circuit, meanwhile there are only <i>O</i>(<i>n</i>) interruptions caused by noise in state preparation and measurement channel since we repeat the measurements only <i>O</i>(<i>n</i>) times in the circuit where <i>n</i> is the number of bits of the integer about to be factored. Linear relationship in thermal relaxation channel is mainly due to the large gap between quantum gate time and relaxation time even if each gate in the circuit is disrupted by noise in thermal relaxation channel such as depolarizing channel. The present research results can be used for correcting the subsequent errors, improving Shor’s algorithm, and providing guidance for the fidelity required in engineering implementation of Shor’s algorithm.

The application of group theory behind modern cryptography

The importance of cryptography and securing data has become increasingly important, and the safety of previous cryptographic methods are also being questioned. In the past few decades, with the rise of modern mathematical tools, notably group theory, cryptography has quickly advanced to more complex and safer levels. This paper will begin by recalling the definition and some terminology about groups. Then, it will summarize two of the most used cryptography systems with underlying group theory: the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Protocol, together with one of its variants, the Ko-Lee-Cheon-Han-Kang-Park Key Agreement, and the RSA Protocol. Also, it examines what the safety of a cryptography system means, and methods to increase the security of these protocols. When talking about the two protocols, extensive group theory is used, both as a means of operation and as a method to prove the protocols validity. Finally, it mentions the possible directions of improvement in this field and whether these cryptographic methods are still reliable, even with the widespread use of quantum computers in the future.

ACKE: Asymmetric Computing Key Exchange Protocol for IoT Environments

Most of the cryptographic protocols currently in use are not appropriate for Internet of Things (IoT) environments because of their huge computing overhead, especially for terminal embedded devices with resource-constrained. Moreover, the computing resources in IoT environments are frequently asymmetric, that is to say, the computing power of the terminal devices is always weak and the server-side is relatively stronger. In order to guarantee the security in the scenario, we present the asymmetric computing cryptosystem. Take the key exchange protocol as an example, we show how to construct ACKE, an asymmetric computing key exchange protocol, by employing the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol and the Subset Product problem (NP-complete) in this paper. The underlying idea this construction is to significantly decrease the computational complexity of one party, and allow for a suitable rise in the computational complexity of another party. Our proposed protocol is implemented on an IoT simulation platform composed of a notebook PC of Intel i5-5200U 2.2GHZ/8G and a smart watch of MTK6062 1.2GHZ/512M. The experimental results show that this work will assist in making the Diffie-Hellman type protocol suitable for practical applications in IoT environments.

An Inquiry-Based Learning Approach to Teaching Undergraduate Cryptology

This article describes the author's experience designing and implementing an inquiry-based learning (IBL) pedagogical approach to an upper-division undergraduate cryptology course. The author shares the course goals and how the IBL style supports their achievement. The article concludes with sample activities – in-class exercises that touch on one-time pad, the Birthday Problem, the Meet-in-the-Middle attack, and Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol, and a programing assignment on the Vigenère cipher.

A Novel Conservative Chaotic System Involved in Hyperbolic Functions and Its Application to Design an Efficient Colour Image Encryption Scheme

It is well known that, compared to low-dimension chaotic systems, three-dimensional chaotic systems have a wider parameter range, more complicated behaviour, and better unpredictability. This fact motivated us to introduce a novel image encryption method that employs a three-dimensional chaotic system. We proposed a novel three-dimensional conservative system that can exhibit chaotic behaviour involving hyperbolic functions. The dynamical behaviours of the proposed system are discovered by calculating Lyapunov exponents and bifurcation diagrams. Thereafter, we designed an image encryption method based on the proposed system and a 4×4 self-invertible matrix. A modified Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol was utilised to generate the self-invertible key matrix Km employed in the diffusion stage. Our approach has three main stages. In the first stage, the proposed three-dimensional system utilises the original image to create three sequences, two of which are chosen for confusion and diffusion processes. The next stage involves confusing the image’s pixels by changing the positions of pixels using these sequences. In the third stage, the confused image is split into sub-blocks of size 4×4, and each block is encrypted by multiplying it with Km. Simulation findings demonstrated that the proposed image scheme has a high level of security and is resistant to statistical analysis, noise, and other attacks.

Non-transferable blockchain-based identity authentication

Due to the identification functionality, identity authentication is the first and primary security step in many information systems. There exist many works dedicated to giving secure identity authentication. However, most of the existing schemes suffer from at least one of the following problems: heavy account management, single point of failure, and privacy leakage. To tackle these challenges, we propose two blockchain-based identity authentication schemes in this paper. One is based on the famous Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol and is efficient but with user-verifier interaction. The other utilizes the ring signature, which is non-interactive with a small computational cost. Besides the traditional security properties, such as unforgeability and identity anonymity, our proposed schemes can hold non-transferability, i.e., the verifier cannot prove the user’s identity authentication to any third party. At last, the extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposals are practical and efficient.

High-Performance RNS Modular Exponentiation by Sum-Residue Reduction

With rapid development and application of artificial intelligence and block chain, the requirement of information and data security is also increased, in which the public-key cryptography, such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptography, plays a significant role. Modular exponentiation is fundamental in computer arithmetic and is widely applied in cryptography, such as ElGamal cryptography, Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol, and RSA cryptography. The implementation of modular exponentiation in a residue number system leads to high parallelism in computation and has been applied in many hardware architectures. While most residue number system (RNS)-based architectures utilize RNS Montgomery algorithm with two residue number systems, the recent modular multiplication algorithm with sum residues performs modular reduction in only one residue number system with about the same parallelism. In this work, it is shown that the high-performance modular exponentiation and RSA cryptography can be implemented in RNS. Both the algorithm and architecture are improved to achieve high performance with extra area overheads, where a 1024-bit modular exponentiation can be completed in 0.567 ms in Xilinx XC6VLX195t-3 platform, costing 26 489 slices, 87 357 LUTs, 363 dedicated multipilers of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$18$</tex-math> </inline-formula> <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times $</tex-math> </inline-formula> <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$18$</tex-math> </inline-formula> bits, and 65 block RAMs.

On the efficiency of a general attack against the MOBS cryptosystem

Abstract All instances of the semidirect key exchange protocol, a generalisation of the famous Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, satisfy the so-called telescoping equality; in some cases, this equality has been used to construct an attack. In this report, we present computational evidence suggesting that an instance of the scheme called “MOBS (matrices over bitstrings)” is an example of a scheme where the telescoping equality has too many solutions to be a practically viable means to conduct an attack.

A Secure Medical Image Transmission System Based On 2D Logistic Map and Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Mechanisms

With the tremendous growth of searchable visual media, the content-based medical image retrieval and computer-aided diagnosis systems have become popular in recent years to improve knowledge and provide facilities for radiologists. Medical images transferred throughout public networks demand a mechanism that guarantees image privacy, ownership and source of origin reliability, and image integrity verification. For this reason, secure image retrieval and diagnosis scheme have been given considerable interest due to users’ security concerns. This work proposed a secure framework based on a two-dimensional (2D) chaotic map with Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocols to ensure patient information privacy and security. Consequently, from a security and protection perspective, the objective is to provide a privacy procedure for medical image retrieval systems through image encryption technique combined with a secure key exchange procedure to minimize the possibility of secret key interception by an unauthorized person. Simulation results and security analysis show that the suggested technique could protect images with minimal time complexity and a high level of security while also resisting numerous attacks.

Signed (Group) Diffie–Hellman Key Exchange with Tight Security

We propose the first tight security proof for the ordinary two-message signed Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol in the random oracle model. Our proof is based on the strong computational Diffie–Hellman assumption and the multiuser security of a digital signature scheme. With our security proof, the signed DH protocol can be deployed with optimal parameters, independent of the number of users or sessions, without the need to compensate any security loss. We abstract our approach with a new notion called verifiable key exchange. In contrast to a known tight three-message variant of the signed Diffie–Hellman protocol (Gjøsteen and Jager, in: Shacham, Boldyreva (eds) CRYPTO 2018, Part II. LNCS, Springer, Heidelberg, 2018), we do not require any modification to the original protocol, and our tightness result is proven in the “Single-Bit-Guess” model which we know can be tightly composed with symmetric cryptographic primitives to establish a secure channel. Finally, we extend our approach to the group setting and construct the first tightly secure group authenticated key exchange protocol.

A novel secured Euclidean space points algorithm for blind spatial image watermarking

Digital raw images obtained from the data set of various organizations require authentication, copyright protection, and security with simple processing. New Euclidean space point’s algorithm is proposed to authenticate the images by embedding binary logos in the digital images in the spatial domain. Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol is implemented along with the Euclidean space axioms to maintain security for the proposed work. The proposed watermarking methodology is tested on the standard set of raw grayscale and RGB color images. The watermarked images are sent in the email, WhatsApp, and Facebook and analyzed. Standard watermarking attacks are also applied to the watermarked images and analyzed. The finding shows that there are no image distortions in the communication medium of email and WhatsApp. But in the Facebook platform, raw images experience compression and observed exponential noise on the digital images. The authentication and copyright protection are tested from the processed Facebook images. It is found that the embedded logo could be recovered and seen with added noise distortions. So the proposed method offers authentication and security with compression attacks. Similarly, it is found that the proposed methodology is robust to JPEG compression, image tampering attacks like collage attack, image cropping, rotation, salt-and-pepper noise, sharpening filter, semi-robust to Gaussian filtering, and image resizing, and fragile to other geometrical attacks. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve is drawn and found that the area under the curve is approximately equal to unity and restoration accuracy of [67 to 100]% for various attacks.

Post-Quantum Secure Password-Authenticated Key Exchange Based on Ouroboros

Password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols play an important role in cryptography. Most of PAKEs are based on the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocols or RSA encryption schemes, but their security is threatened by quantum computers. In this study, we propose the first code-based PAKE protocol based on Ouroboros, which is a code-based key exchange protocol. Our scheme enjoys high efficiency and provides mutual explicit authentication, with a security reduction to decoding random quasi-cyclic codes in the random oracle model.

Location privacy in VANETs: Provably secure anonymous key exchange protocol based on self-blindable signatures

Security and privacy in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are challenging in terms of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) features. The distribution and decentralisation of vehicles could threaten location privacy and confidentiality in the absence of trusted third parties (TTP)s or if they are otherwise compromised. If the same digital signatures (or the same certificates) are used for different communications, then adversaries could easily apply linking attacks. Unfortunately, most of the existing schemes for VANETs in the literature do not satisfy the required levels of security, location privacy, and efficiency simultaneously. This paper presents a new and efficient end-to-end anonymous key exchange protocol based on Yang et al. 's self-blindable signatures. In our protocol, vehicles first privately blind their own private certificates for each communication outside the mix-zone and then compute an anonymous shared key based on zero-knowledge proof of knowledge (PoK). The efficiency comes from the fact that once the signatures are verified, the ephemeral values in PoK are also used to compute a shared key through an authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. Therefore, the protocol does not require any further external information to generate a shared key. Our protocol also does not require an interference with the Roadside Units or Certificate Authorities, and hence can be securely run outside the mixed-zones. We demonstrate the security of our protocol in an ideal/real simulation paradigm. Hence, our protocol achieves secure authentication, forward unlinkability, and accountability. Furthermore, the performance analysis shows that our protocol is more efficient in terms of computational and communication overheads compared to existing schemes.

Towards Blockchain-Based Secure Storage and Trusted Data Sharing Scheme for IoT Environment

Nowadays, cloud-based storage systems play a vital role in IoT data storage, processing, and sharing. Despite its contribution, the current cloud-based architecture may cause severe data leakage or jeopardize user privacy. Meanwhile, the cloud-based architecture heavily relies on a trusted third-party auditor (TPA) and runs in a centralized control manner. However, the TPA may not be a completely trustworthy entity, and a single point of failure might cause the centralized system to collapse. Fortunately, with the advent of blockchain technology, the decentralized storage model has gained popularity. A decentralized storage system successfully eradicates the rule of TPA, solves the problem of a single point of failure, and has many advantages over a centralized control architecture, such as low storage prices and high throughput. This study offers a blockchain-based decentralized distributed storage and sharing scheme that provides end-to-end encryption and fine-grained access control. In our proposed IoTChain model, fine-grained permission is based on attribute-based access control (A-BAC) policy by employing the Ethereum blockchain as an auditable access control layer. Smart contracts are tailored for the IoTChain model, which combines the Ethereum blockchain and the interplanetary file system (IPFS). We used an advanced encryption standard (AES) for encryption and the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol for secret key sharing between data owners and users. Also, the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism is replaced with a proof-of-authority (PoA) to minimize system transaction cost and boost system throughput. Additionally, our solution has been tested on the Ethereum official test network Rinkeby, and the results demonstrate that our approach is realistic and economical on the IoT data.

Secure Audio-Visual Data Exchange for Android In-Vehicle Ecosystems

Mobile device pairing inside vehicles is a ubiquitous task which requires easy to use and secure solutions. In this work we exploit the audio-video domain for pairing devices inside vehicles. In principle, we rely on the widely used elliptical curve version of the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol and extract the session keys from the acoustic domain as well as from the visual domain by using the head unit display. The need for merging the audio-visual domains first stems from the fact that in-vehicle head units generally do not have a camera so they cannot use visual data from smartphones, however, they are equipped with microphones and can use them to collect audio data. Acoustic channels are less reliable as they are more prone to errors due to environmental noise. However, this noise can be also exploited in a positive way to extract secure seeds from the environment and audio channels are harder to intercept from the outside. On the other hand, visual channels are more reliable but can be more easily spotted by outsiders, so they are more vulnerable for security applications. Fortunately, mixing these two types of channels results in a solution that is both more reliable and secure for performing a key exchange.

QKD Based on Symmetric Entangled Bernstein-Vazirani.

This paper introduces a novel entanglement-based QKD protocol, that makes use of a modified symmetric version of the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm, in order to achieve secure and efficient key distribution. Two variants of the protocol, one fully symmetric and one semi-symmetric, are presented. In both cases, the spatially separated Alice and Bob share multiple EPR pairs, each one qubit of the pair. The fully symmetric version allows both parties to input their tentative secret key from their respective location and acquire in the end a totally new and original key, an idea which was inspired by the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. In the semi-symmetric version, Alice sends her chosen secret key to Bob (or vice versa). The performance of both protocols against an eavesdroppers attack is analyzed. Finally, in order to illustrate the operation of the protocols in practice, two small scale but detailed examples are given.