Efficient Key Agreement Protocol Research Articles

An efficient key agreement and authentication protocol for secure communication in industrial IoT applications

A most prominent and emerging technology namely the Internet of Things (IoT) enables legitimate users to access and monitor the sensors installed in various units of the industry. Such access and monitoring is facilitated using a secure authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol. However, the complexity arises during the establishment of an effective session key agreement protocol to allow users to communicate securely with the sensors placed in the industrial IoT (IIoT). Few key agreement protocols existing in the literature have proved to perform the task effectively. Nevertheless, such protocols suffer from increased computation and communication cost. Hence, the motivation is to develop an efficient key agreement protocol that could over perform the existing protocols. Therefore, this research paper proposes an efficient key agreement protocol which is computationally and communication efficient. Moreover, the proposed key agreement protocol permits the users to securely communicate with the sensors. The proposed work focuses on twin dimensions. The first dimension is to reduce the computational complexity while sharing the mutual session key among the users and sensors. The second dimension focuses on decreasing the communicational cost. This is achieved by minimizing the amount of information communicated among the users and sensors. Subsequently, the proposed protocol is a hybrid methodology in which there are two working layers through which the session key is established. In the first layer, a mutual secret key is generated using a well-known elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) technique and this is shared among the users and the gateway node (GWN). In the second layer, the key generated in the above layer is used and the user initiates the key agreement process, wherein the GWN and sensors are generating a mutual session key using a group key. The simulated results of the proposed work clearly depicts the substantial reduction of computational and communicational complexities.

An efficient circle-type multiparty quantum key agreement protocol with single particles

An efficient circle-type multiparty quantum key agreement protocol utilizing two non-orthogonal bases single particles is proposed. In our protocol, each participant performs one of two simple unitary operations to encode and additional unitary operations to protect his privacy. Both outside attacks and participant attacks can be perfectly resisted. Moreover, our protocol has a high efficiency up to [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the number of the participants, and it can be easily implemented with current quantum technologies as it needs only single particle measurements.

An improved certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement protocol for wireless sensor networks

Key agreement is an important way to achieve secure communication between the two or more parties. In the past decade, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received great attention and contributed to the development of low-power sensor networks. In WSNs, sensor nodes are generally inexpensive, low-power devices with limited computing and storage capabilities. So it is very valuable to design a secure and efficient key agreement protocol for WSNs. Recently, Bala et al. (2016b) put forward a certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement (CL2PAKA) protocol for WSNs and asserted that it is provably secure in the extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) model. In this paper, by showing the concrete attack, Bala et al's protocol was proved to be vulnerable against the type I adversary. In order to make up for the security flaws, an improved protocol is proposed. It does not require pairing operations and requires only five scale multiplication operations, so it is suit for WSNs.

An improved certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement protocol for wireless sensor networks

Key agreement is an important way to achieve secure communication between the two or more parties. In the past decade, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received great attention and contributed to the development of low-power sensor networks. In WSNs, sensor nodes are generally inexpensive, low-power devices with limited computing and storage capabilities. So it is very valuable to design a secure and efficient key agreement protocol for WSNs. Recently, Bala et al. (2016b) put forward a certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement (CL2PAKA) protocol for WSNs and asserted that it is provably secure in the extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) model. In this paper, by showing the concrete attack, Bala et al's protocol was proved to be vulnerable against the type I adversary. In order to make up for the security flaws, an improved protocol is proposed. It does not require pairing operations and requires only five scale multiplication operations, so it is suit for WSNs.

An efficient secret key agreement protocol based on random noise without beacons

ABSTRACTComputationally lightweight and unconditionally secure key agreement protocols are very useful for secure communication in public networks, especially for sensors with limited computing resources. In 2017, Guan and Tseng proposed a key agreement protocol which is computationally lightweight and unconditionally secure. In their protocol, it was assumed that the two communicating nodes can receive random bit string from a beacon node. Random bit string plays an important role in the generation of secret keys. With the advancement of hardware and software technologies, sensors may be able to generate good random strings. In this paper, we consider the case that the sensor nodes can generate random bit strings for secret keys. Therefore, no beacon nodes are required. The results of this study show that a key agreement protocol can be much more effective and efficient in the case that the communicating nodes can generate good random bit strings.

An efficient key agreement protocol for Sybil-precaution in online social networks

Identifying malicious users in online social networks (OSNs) is a challenging task that demands a great deal of skill and knowledge because these users can have multiple forms: Sybils, bots, spammers, phishers, impersonations or fake accounts. Different types of research methodologies have been proposed to solve this problem; hence, there are varied solutions. Most of the work on OSNs has focused on trust, distrust to detect and preventing these types of attacks. Some researchers have found that a suspected node can generate private/public keys to prevent its identity from being stolen by an adversary; however, they have not explained how these keys are generated and managed. We propose a new and efficient centralized key management protocol to prevent Sybil attack and to provide a secure communication service among users in OSNs. The core tenet of this method is the existence of a ‘roadblock’ that any user intending to join a group must go through, which includes a task that only a human user can accomplish. Hence, automatically controlled accounts are prevented from joining, and the group will consist only of users that have been confirmed as genuine. The mechanism is very effective in recognizing bot accounts, which enables it to guard the network against malicious behavior by fake accounts.

Comments on “An improved secure and efficient password and chaos-based two-party key agreement protocol”

Recently, Liu and Xue proposed a secure two-party password-based authenticated key exchange protocol by utilizing the semi-group property of the Chebyshev chaotic maps. We exploit the vulnerability of the protocol in this paper by illustrating an off-line password guessing attack. In this attack, the password of a honest user will be recover by an attacker without being noticed by the server or the victim. To overcome such problem, we propose a simple and compatible fix.

An efficient identity-based key agreement protocol in a multiple PKG environment

Identity-based key agreement protocol affords a natural way to combine the participant’s identity with its public key. However, most of them just consider the key agreement in a single private key generator (PKG) environment. In addition, the existing key agreement protocols have a great computing overhead for mobile computing which is more and more popular today. This paper proposes a new identity based key agreement protocol. With the help of mathematical tools, we make our protocol applied in multiple PKG environment. It also satisfies all the security properties which is set for key agreement protocol. Moreover, some of its time-consuming operations can be delivered to untrusted public computation resources, so its computing complexity can be greatly reduced.

Weakness and Improvement of an Efficient Key Agreement Protocol

Xiao and Li proposed protocol XKAS and claimed it to be an efficient and secure two-party authenticated Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol. In this letter, we show that the protocol is vulne- rable to a key-compromise impersonation attack. We also proposed XKAS+, which can withstand such attacks. The new protocol enjoys this property at the expense of a slight increase in computational workload with respect to the original version.

Secure-AKA: An Efficient AKA Protocol for UMTS Networks

In this paper, we propose an improved and efficient authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol named "Secure-AKA" to prevent Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) network from various attacks like man-in-the-middle attack, redirection attack, replay attack, active attacks in the corrupted UMTS networks, and especially denial of service attack. This protocol completely eliminates the need of counter synchronization between a mobile station and its home network, and protects the actual identity of each user over the network by generating a temporary identity during the authentication. The Secure-AKA protocol generates minimum communication and computation overheads as compared to UMTS-AKA, S-AKA, AP-AKA, EURASIP-AKA, COCKTAIL-AKA, X-AKA, and EXT-AKA protocols. On an average, Secure-AKA protocol reduces 65 % of the bandwidth consumption during the authentication process in comparison to UMTS-AKA, which is the maximum reduction of bandwidth by any AKA protocol referred in the paper.

Mutual-anonymity and Authentication Key Agreement Protocol

According to the characteristics of trusted computation, we proposed an efficient pseudonym ring signature-based authentication and key agreement protocol with mutual anonymity. The use of ring signature can hide the identity information of communicating parties and effectively prevent the leakage of private information. Finally we derive a shared session key between them for their future secure communication especially in the trusted computation environment. Our protocol reaches the level of universally composable security and is more efficient.

On the Security of an Efficient and Non-interactive Hierarchical Key Agreement Protocol

As a fundamental cryptographic primitive, key agreement protocol allows two or more parties to agree on shared keys which will be used to protect their later communication. To resist against the corruption of any number of nodes at any level in the hierarchy, Guo et al. (Comput Secur 30:28---34, 2011) proposed a novel non-interactive hierarchical identity-based key agreement protocol along with a claimed security proof in the random oracle model. Unfortunately, by giving concrete attacks, we indicate that Guo et al.'s protocol is not secure even against the corruption of any leaf or intermediate nodes in the hierarchy. Concretely, the session key of one node will be compromised provided that one of its child node has been corrupted.

Efficient password-authenticated key agreement protocol for smart cards based on ECC

Today, networks are no longer limited to servers and desktops. A lot of information transfer is done over mobile devices like smart cards, cell phones, PDAs etc. User authentication and session key agreement is an important aspect of a secure information system. In this paper, we propose an efficient password-authenticated protocol for smart cards which provides user authentication and session key agreement. This protocol is based on ECC and has the following merits: 1) The computation and communication cost is low; 2) The password can be freely chosen by the user; 3) There is no time synchronisation problem; 4) It prevents the offline dictionary attack even if the information stored in the smart card is compromised; 5) It provides for mutual authentication and session key agreement; 6) All well known attacks are prevented using our protocol; 7) The identity of the user changes dynamically for every new session.

A Secure and Efficient Key Agreement Protocol Based on Certificateless Cryptography

Almost all the certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement (CTAKA) protocols found in the literature, suffer either serious security problems or inefficient performance that involves high computational costs. In this paper, we design a secure and efficient CTAKA protocol. Within the proposed CTAKA protocol, the KGC publishes the public keys of the users in a public directory (LDAP server) that has a certificate to prove its identity to the users. The LDAP certificate is the only existing certificate within the scheme. Both the two communicating parties are able to compute a common secret per session key using a secure generated random number. The protocol is fully secure against type 1 attack and fully secure against type 2 attacks under the assumptions that the KGC is an honest party and each party within the network has the full capability to keep its secret values safe. Moreover, the setup of the protocol does not include pairings and the whole key agreement process requires only four point scalar multiplications, two point additions, one hash function evaluation and one message exchange.

On-line password guessing attack on Lu-Cao key agreement protocol for secure authentication

In 2006, Lu and Cao proposed an off-line password guessing attack on an efficient key agreement protocol for secure authentication. Lu and Cao pointed out that the Kim et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to the off-line password guessing attack. Therefore, they presented a modified protocol to avoid this attack. However, in this paper, we shall show that their modified protocol cannot resist the on-line password guessing attack.

Robust and efficient authenticated key agreement in mobile communications

Nowadays, the Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications is used widely by people around the world. However, there are some problems of GSM authentication to be found. In 2004, Choi and Kim proposed an authentication and key agreement scheme with user privacy protection in GSM. They claimed that their scheme can improve some drawbacks of GSM authentication and achieve user privacy protection. But we find that Choi and Kim's (2004) scheme is not able to achieve privacy protection and resist some well-known attacks completely. In this paper, we propose a more efficient GSM authentication and key agreement protocol with robust identity privacy protection.

Obtaining a secure and efficient key agreement protocol from (H)MQV and NAXOS

LaMacchia, Lauter and Mityagin recently presented a strong security definition for authenticated key agreement strengthening the well-known Canetti-Krawczyk definition. They also described a protocol, called NAXOS, that enjoys a simple security proof in the new model. Compared to MQV and HMQV, NAXOS is less efficient and cannot be readily modified to obtain a one-pass protocol. On the other hand MQV does not have a security proof, and the HMQV security proof is extremely complicated. This paper proposes a new authenticated key agreement protocol, called CMQV (`Combined' MQV), which incorporates design principles from MQV, HMQV and NAXOS. The new protocol achieves the efficiency of HMQV and admits a natural one-pass variant. Moreover, we present a relatively simple and intuitive proof that CMQV is secure in the LaMacchia-Lauter-Mityagin model.

Key agreement for key hypergraph

In this paper, we propose a key agreement protocol for a key hypergraph. In a key hypergraph, a party is represented as a vertex and a group of parties is represented as a hyperedge. A key agreement protocol for a key hypergraph establishes all the keys for hyperedges in a key hypergraph at the same time. A naive approach would be to run a group key protocol concurrently for each hyperedge. By using the randomness re-use technique, we propose an efficient key agreement protocol for a key hypergraph, which is of two rounds. We formalize the key exchange model for a key hypergraph which is an extension of a group key exchange model and especially incorporates insider attacks. The proposed key agreement protocol for a key hypergraph provides key independence and forward secrecy in the random oracle model under the computational Diffie–Hellman assumption.

The importance of proofs of security for key establishment protocols: Formal analysis of Jan–Chen, Yang–Shen–Shieh, Kim–Huh–Hwang–Lee, Lin–Sun–Hwang, and Yeh–Sun protocols

Despite the importance of proofs in assuring protocol implementers about the security properties of key establishment protocols, many protocol designers fail to provide any proof of security. Flaws detected long after the publication and/or implementation of protocols will erode the credibility of key establishment protocols. We revisit recent work of Choo, Boyd, Hitchcock, Maitland where they utilize the Bellare, Pointcheval, Rogaway (Authenticated key exchange secure against dictionary attacks, in: B. Preneel (Ed.), Advances in Cryptology – Eurocrypt 2000, Springer-Verlag, LNCS 1807/2000, pp. 139–155, 2000) computational complexity proof model in a machine specification and analysis (using an automated model checker – SHVT) for provably secure key establishment protocol analysis. We then examine several key establishment protocols without proofs of security, namely: protocols due to J.-K. Jan, Y.-H. Chen (A new efficient MAKEP for wireless communications, in: 18th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications – AINA 2004, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 347–350, 2004), W.-H. Yang, J.-C. Shen, S.-P. Shieh (Designing authentication protocols against guessing attacks. Technical Report 2(3), Institute of Information & Computing Machinery, Taiwan, 1999. http://www.iicm.org.tw/communication/c2_3/page07.doc), Y.-S. Kim, E.-N. Huh, J. Hwang, B.-W. Lee (An efficient key agreement protocol for secure authentication, in: A. Laganà, M.L. Gavrilova, V. Kumar, Y. Mun, C.J.K. Tan, O. Gervasi (Eds.), International Conference On Computational Science And Its Applications – ICCSA 2004, Springer-Verlag, LNCS 3043/2004, pp. 746-754, 2004), C.-L. Lin, H.-M. Sun, T. Hwang. (Three-party encrypted key exchange: attacks and a solution, in: A CM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, pp. 12–20, 2000), and H.-T. Yeh, H.-M. Sun (Simple authenticated key agreement protocol resistant to password guessing attacks, in: A CM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 36(4), pp. 14–22, 2002). Using these protocols as case studies, we demonstrate previously unpublished flaws in these protocols. We may speculate that such errors could have been found by protocol designers if proofs of security were to be constructed, and hope this work will encourage future protocol designers to provide proofs of security.

난수 재사용 기법을 이용한 다중 키 교환 프로토콜

이 논문에서 우리는 여러 사용자들이 동시에 세션키를 교환하는 키 교환 스킴에 대해서 연구한다. 이런 상황은 사용자들을 그래프 노드들로 표현하고 두 사용자간에 키를 만들어야 하는 상황을 에지로 표현하는 키 그래프에 의해서 묘사될 수 있다. 우리는 키 그래프에 있는 모든 에지들을 위한 세션키들을 하나의 세션에서 동시에 만드는 키 교환 스킴을 설계한다. 키 그래프를 위한 키 교환은 양자간 키 교환의 확장판이라고 할 수 있다. 우리는 양자간 키 교환 안전성 모델을 확장해서 키 그래프를 위한 키 교환 안전성 모델을 제안한다. 우리는 란수 직 산용 테크닉을 사용해서 두개의 키 그래프를 위한 키 교환 스킴을 설계하며 안전성을 증명한다. 우리가 제안하는 스킴들의 안전성은 decisional Diffie-Hellman 가정에 의존한다. 첫 번째 스킴은 일 라운드 키 교환 프로토콜이며 키 독립성을 보장한다. 두 번째 스킴은 일 라운드이며 전방위 안전성을 보장한다. 제안하는 두 가지 스킴들의 안전성은 모두 표준 모델에서 증명된다. 제안되는 프로토콜들은 최초의 다중 키 교환 프로토콜이며, 단순히 양자간 키 교환 프로토콜들을 반복 사용해서 키들을 만드는 것보다 훨씬 효율적이다. 예로서 한 사용자가 n명의 다른 사용자와 키를 만든다고 가정하자. 가장 단순한 프로토콜은 각각의 사용자들과의 키 교환을 위해서 양자간 키 교환을 사용하는 것으로서, 이 때는 계산량과 메시지 전송량이 n에 비례하게 된다. 제안되는 프로토콜들은 n개의 키를 만드는데 있어서 계산량은 n에 비례하나 전송되는 메시지의 양은 교환되는 키들의 수에 상관없이 일정하다. In the paper we study key agreement schemes when a party needs to establish a session key with each of several parties, thus having multiple session keys. This situation can be represented by a graph, tailed a key graph, where a vertex represents a party and an edge represents a relation between two parties sharing a session key. graphs to establish all session keys corresponding to all edges in a key graph simultaneously in a single session. A key agreement protocol of a key graph is a natural extension of a two-party key agreement protocol. We propose a new key exchange model for key graphs which is an extension of a two-party key exchange model. using the so-called randomness re-use technique which re-uses random values to make session keys for different sessions, we suggest two efficient key agreement protocols for key graphs based on the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption, and prove their securities in the key exchange model of key graphs. Our first scheme requires only a single round and provides key independence. Our second scheme requires two rounds and provides forward secrecy. Both are proven secure In the standard model. The suggested protocols are the first pairwise key agreement protocols and more efficient than a simple scheme which uses a two-party key exchange for each necessary key. Suppose that a user makes a session key with n other users, respectively. The simple scheme's computational cost and the length of the transmitted messages are increased by a factor of n. The suggested protocols's computational cost also depends on n, but the length of the transmitted messages are constant.