Identity-based Key Agreement Research Articles

LIKA: Lightweight Identity Based Key Agreement Protocol for Secure Data Transmission in Advanced Metering Infrastructure of Smart Grid

Integration of information communication technology via the Internet of Things devices and sensors can enable an efficient power service for utility providers to consumers in advanced metering infrastructure. Authentication and cryptographic mechanisms protect identity, data security and privacy from unauthorised interception for smart meters to servers. In the last couple of years, many key agreement protocols have been prescribed and deployed to fix those issues. Unfortunately, the deployed protocols did not work inside the same protocols, specifically parameter detection and recognition for session key generation, as they entail high computation time and communication bits overheads. Furthermore, the absence of forward secrecy and user anonymity affects the authentication. Therefore, we have proposed a lightweight identity-based key agreement (LIKA) utilising the Diffie–Hellman cryptography with a trusted authority. It seeks to cover both the security and performance criteria with equal weight. The protocol is evaluated by the Canetti and Krawczyk adversarial model, Avispa and cryptographic analysis released the session keys that were not considered as an adversary during mutual authentication. Moreover, as compared to related work, the proposed protocol took the least amount of time (5.319 ms and 1056 bits) for the entire process of session key generation. Furthermore, comparative analysis has shown that the LIKA adequately encompasses computation, communication, and security assessments. Consequently, it is more convenient for practical implementation for a smart grid.

Identity-Based Key Agreement for Blockchain-Powered Intelligent Edge

In the new paradigm of blockchain-powered intelligent edge, the key agreement is a significant problem that has not been extensively studied so far. Existing key agreement protocols in the traditional public-key setting are usually too complicated and heavy for edge and end devices. Besides, most protocols in use do not have effective measures to resist side-channel attacks, which are increasingly threatening cloud servers, edge devices, and end devices. Identity (ID)-based protocols can be conveniently implemented in the blockchain-powered intelligent edge. Several leakage-resilient ID-based protocols, which can resist side-channel attacks, have been proposed. However, they all involve time-consuming pairing computations. Besides, none of them address side-channel attacks to the key generation center (KGC). This article designs and realizes two novel ID-based key agreement protocols for the blockchain-powered intelligent edge, including an extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) secure ID-based authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol and a continuous after-the-fact leakage-resilient eCK (CAFL-eCK) secure ID-based AKA protocol. Both protocols do not involve any heavy pairing computation. Besides, the second one can resist side-channel attacks to the KGC and the communicating parties. A hybrid implementation of the two protocols can achieve high efficiency and strong security at the same time in blockchain-powered intelligent edge environments. This is demonstrated via a use case of a blockchain-powered smart home.

Provably Secure Authentication Protocol for Mobile Clients in IoT Environment Using Puncturable Pseudorandom Function

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a framework of various services and smart technologies that mutually communicate information between mobile devices and users or just between devices with the help of Internet connectivity. The dramatic progression of IoT helps numerous network applications and communication technologies to introduce state-of-the-art communication models for enabling interaction among mobile server, clients, and various other smart entities. Now-a-days, online mobile services have gained huge attention by providing ample convenience to the distant users. However, it is necessary to secure the information, being exchanged among mobile clients and server. Therefore, a large number of authentication protocols have been presented but majority of them are unsuitable to fulfill novel security requirements and standards. Moreover, they are incompatible for the IoT environment due to higher computation and communication complexity. Consequently, there is a dire need of developing an adequate, reliable, and cost-effective authentication protocol. In this article, we introduce a novel identity-based key agreement protocol using the puncturable pseudorandom functions for mobile clients in the IoT environment. The proposed PSK-MC protocol enables two mobile clients to accomplish mutual authentication via server. The proposed protocol is evaluated formally and informally to determine its security strength. The formal security analysis is presented using the widely used random oracle model. Moreover, all the cryptographic operations used at mobile client side are executed on a mobile device, while the operations used at the server side are implemented on a desktop machine to get the experimental results to determine computation cost. The performance analysis reveals the fact that our protocol is comparatively better than related protocols by exhibiting least communication and computation overhead.

A Provably Secure and Lightweight Identity-Based Two-Party Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

As an important part of smart cities, vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted much attention from both industry and academia. In a VANET, generating a secure session key to facilitate subsequent data-in-transit transfer between two or more vehicles is crucial, which can be achieved by using an authenticated key agreement protocol. However, most of the existing identity-based two-party authenticated key agreement protocols have significant computational requirements or are known to be insecure. Thus, in this paper, a secure and efficient identity-based two-party authenticated key agreement protocol is presented by us. This protocol does not involve complex bilinear pairing computations and can generate a valid session key in two rounds. The security of the proposed protocol is proved in the eCK model which has better capability to describe a protocol’s security than the famous CK model, and it has been widely used in the security proof of ID-based key agreement protocols currently. Additionally, we also evaluate its performance for potential utility in a VANET.

A hierarchical identity-based security for delay tolerant networks using lattice-based cryptography

Routing and secure communication are important concerns in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). Previously designed security schemes utilize traditional public key cryptosystems for entity and data security that provide security under some hard problems like integer factorization and discrete logarithmic problems. These algorithms are vulnerable to Quantum attacks. In this paper lattice based cryptosystem has been used first time for DTN security. Lattice based cryptosystems utilize post-quantum cryptographic algorithms which are unbreakable by quantum attacks. First we present a novel Hierarchical structure for DTN having intracluster and intercluster communications. Then, we propose a security design to provide end-to-end security to DTN application data using lattice based cryptographic signature and encryption algorithms, secure under LWE hard problem over lattices. For securing intracluster and intercluster communication, three new schemes have been proposed: (i) Lattice based hierarchical identity-based key agreement scheme, based on lattice based Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol, secure under LWE assumption but adapted to hierarchical structure. (ii) To derive new session keys, i.e. keys for new joining nodes and for key refreshment, a new lattice based hierarchical identity-based key update scheme has been proposed, which is based on Singh et al.’s lattice based forward secure identity-based encryption algorithm, (iii) A lattice based non-interactive key agreement scheme, based on schemes proposed by Agrawal et al. and Singh et al., has been proposed for generating a secret key for two communicating nodes in different clusters. This design can effectively resist man-in-the-middle attack, replay attack, dictionary attack, and parallel session attack and maintains forward and backward secrecy.

Group Key Agreement Protocol Based on Privacy Protection and Attribute Authentication

Group key agreement is a good way to ensure secure communication within a group. However, the identity authentication, privacy protection, and information sharing access control (different access rights may exist for different sensitivity of information) are key issues to be solved in group key agreement. Aiming at these problems, this paper proposes a group key agreement protocol based on privacy protection and attribute authentication (GKA-PPAA). The protocol proposes identity authentication for hidden attributes; it not only preserves the advantages of traditional identity-based key agreement protocol, but also provides hiding the identity information and privacy protection of the individual, and also proposes information sharing access control, which different secret information is shared among a set of members who have different levels of authority. It increases the flexibility of group key management. In addition, the group key factors are also calculated before the group key agreement, which eliminates most of the computation overhead due to the group key agreement. This protocol is proven secure under the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) and decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) problem assumptions. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is much more efficient than the existing ones.

Authenticated Privacy Preserving Pairing-Based Scheme for Remote Health Monitoring Systems

The digitization of patient health information has brought many benefits and challenges for both the patients and physicians. However, security and privacy preservation have remained important challenges for remote health monitoring systems. Since a patient’s health information is sensitive and the communication channel (i.e. the Internet) is insecure, it is important to protect them against unauthorized entities. Otherwise, failure to do so will not only lead to compromise of a patient’s privacy, but will also put his/her life at risk. How to provide for confidentiality, patient anonymity and un-traceability, access control to a patient’s health information and even key exchange between a patient and her physician are critical issues that need to be addressed if a wider adoption of remote health monitoring systems is to be realized. This paper proposes an authenticated privacy preserving pairing-based scheme for remote health monitoring systems. The scheme is based on the concepts of bilinear paring, identity-based cryptography and non-interactive identity-based key agreement protocol. The scheme also incorporates an efficient batch signature verification scheme to reduce computation cost during multiple simultaneous signature verifications.

Security Remarks on Secure Authentication Scheme for Remote Health Monitoring System using WBAN

To provide secure authentication for wireless body area networks (WBANs), recently Mtonga proposed a scheme based on identity-based cryptography, bilinear pairing and non-interactive identity-based key agreement scheme. He argued that his scheme provides authenticated key agreement, privacy preservation and authenticity, integrity and freshness of transmitted health messages. Unfortunately, this paper provides security remarks on Mtonga’s scheme focused on lack of integrity provision, lack of untraceability and masquerading attack feasibility. They are very important aspects in a system’s required security and privacy features. Furthermore, this paper provides simple directions of the counterpart’s solutions on them.

Round-optimal ID-based dynamic authenticated group key agreement

A group key agreement protocol provides a set of users with a shared secret key to achieve cryptographic goal. When membership changes, group session key should be updated efficiently and securely. Hence, dynamic group key agreement protocols are of practical significance. Identity-based group key agreement protocols are preferred to certificate-based ones since identity-based protocols can simplify public key management procedure. Most of previous dynamic group key agreement protocols need at least two rounds to establish or refresh group session keys. In this paper, an identity-based dynamic authenticated group key agreement DAGKA protocol is presented. It is round-optimal, since: 1 in setup and join algorithms, only one round of communication is required; 2 in leave algorithm, there is no message exchange among group members. Joining members cannot compute previous session keys and leaving members cannot compute subsequent session keys. The protocol is provably secure. Its AKE-security is proved under decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman DBDH assumption. In addition, the protocol resists key control attack and achieves forward security.

PF-ID-2PAKA: Pairing Free Identity-Based Two-Party Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

To ensure secure communication between any two entities, authenticated key agreement protocol is the primary step and current research has a lot of contribution in this direction. In this paper, we propose a Pairing Free Identity-based Two-Party Authenticated Key Agreement protocol and gather the implementation results for Wireless Sensor Networks on MICAz mote by using Relic-toolkit cryptographic library. The proposed protocol is efficient as it does not use any pairing operation and only uses three scalar point multiplications. The security of the protocol has been proved secure using strongest security model for identity-based key agreement protocol presented by Liang et al.

RYY ++ : A Novel Provably Secure Identity‐Based Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol

Based on revisiting the RYY+ Identitybased (ID-Based) key agreement protocol, we find it’s vulnerable to Intermediate results leakage (IRL) and Keycompromise impersonation (KCI) attack. A novel protocol called RYY++ is proposed to make up for its deficiencies. Our protocol follows the Full dual exponential challenge response (FDCR-1) scheme to ensure the signature change every time, so the master public key of Private key generator (PKG) joined in signature generation can guarantee two parties trust each other. The RYY++ protocol is also proven to be secure in the Strengthened extended Canetti– Krawczyk (SeCK) model which provides better support for adversary’s query and has an advantage over most existing protocols on security and efficiency.

Freshness-preserving non-interactive hierarchical key agreement protocol over WHMS.

The digitization of patient health information (PHI) for wireless health monitoring systems (WHMSs) has brought many benefits and challenges for both patients and physicians. However, security, privacy and robustness have remained important challenges for WHMSs. Since the patient's PHI is sensitive and the communication channel, i.e., the Internet, is insecure, it is important to protect them against unauthorized entities, i.e., attackers. Otherwise, failure to do so will not only lead to the compromise of a patient's privacy, but will also put his/her life at risk. This paper proposes a freshness-preserving non-interactive hierarchical key agreement protocol (FNKAP) for WHMSs. The FNKAP is based on the concept of the non-interactive identity-based key agreement for communication efficiency. It achieves patient anonymity between a patient and physician, session key secrecy and resistance against various security attacks, especially including replay attacks.

Perfect Forward Secure ID-based Key Agreement Protocol in Group Communication

Several identity-based key agreement protocols using bilinear pairing have been proposed in recent years and none of them has achieved all required security properties. In this paper, we firstly propose an ID-based one round authenticated group key agreement protocol with bilinear pairings, where all participants can generate the group session key in one round. Based on the intractability of elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, every user’s private key can be proved to be secure. Also an extended version of one round authenticated group key agreement protocol is given, it provide perfect forward secrecy and avoid key escrow by the Key Generation Center. Finally, a comprehensive security analysis and a comprehensive security analysis are provided. By comparing with other protocols, the proposed protocol requires lower computation cost.

Perfect Forward Secure ID-based Key Agreement Protocol in Group Communication

Perfect Forward Secure ID-based Key Agreement Protocol in Group Communication

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.

A Pairing-free ID-based Key Agreement Protocol with Different PKGs

This paper proposes an identity based key agreement protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) between users of different networks with independent private key generations (PKGs). Instead of bilinear pairings which commonly used for contracting identity based schemes, the proposed protocol makes use of elliptic curves to obtain more computational efficiency. The proposed protocol develops Cao et al’s protocol for situations that two users of independent organizations or networks with separate servers (that in this article, are named PKGs, based on their main duty, generating private keys for the users) want to share a secret key via an insecure link. The main novelty of this paper is security proof of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model. The security proof argues the security attributes of the proposed protocol.

Interdomain Identity-Based Key Agreement Schemes

In order to simplify key management, two-party and three-party key agreement schemes based on user identities have been proposed recently. Multiparty (including more than three parties) key agreement protocols, which also are called conference key schemes, can be applied to distributed systems and wireless environments, such as ad hoc networks, for the purpose of multiparty secure communication. However, it is hard to extend two- or three-party schemes to multiparty ones with the guarantee of efficiency and security. In addition to the above two properties, interdomain environments should also be considered in key agreement systems due to diversified network domains. However, only few identity-based multiparty conference key agreement schemes for single domain environments and none for interdomain environments were proposed in the literature and they did not satisfy all of the security attributes such as forward secrecy and withstanding impersonation. In this paper, we will propose a novel efficient single domain identity-based multiparty conference key scheme and extend it to an interdomain one. Finally, we prove that the proposed schemes satisfy the required security attributes via formal methods.

An identity-based key agreement scheme for large scale sensor networks

To solve the problems of high memory occupation, low connectivity and poor resiliency against node capture, which existing in the random key pre-distribution techniques while applying to the large scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), an Identity-Based Key Agreement Scheme (IBKAS) is proposed based on identity-based encryption and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH). IBKAS can resist man-in-the-middle attacks and node-capture attacks through encrypting the key agreement parameters using identity-based encryption. Theoretical analysis indicates that comparing to the random key pre-distribution techniques, IBKAS achieves significant improvement in key connectivity, communication overhead, memory occupation, and security strength, and also enables efficient secure rekeying and network expansion. Furthermore, we implement IBKAS for TinyOS-2.1.2 based on the MICA2 motes, and the experiment results demonstrate that IBKAS is feasible for infrequent key distribution and rekeying for large scale sensor networks.

TinyIBAK: Design and Prototype Implementation of An Identity-based Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Large Scale Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose an authenticated key agreement scheme, TinyIBAK, based on the identity-based cryptography and bilinear paring, for large scale sensor networks. We prove the security of our proposal in the random oracle model. According to the formal security validation using AVISPA, the proposed scheme is strongly secure against the passive and active attacks, such as replay, man-in-the middle and node compromise attacks, etc. We implemented our proposal for TinyOS-2.1, analyzed the memory occupation, and evaluated the time and energy performance on the MICAz motes using the Avrora toolkits. Moreover, we deployed our proposal within the TOSSIM simulation framework, and investigated the effect of node density on the performance of our scheme. Experimental results indicate that our proposal consumes an acceptable amount of resources, and is feasible for infrequent key distribution and rekeying in large scale sensor networks. Compared with other ID-based key agreement approaches, TinyIBAK is much more efficient or comparable in performance but provides rekeying. Compared with the traditional key pre-distribution schemes, TinyIBAK achieves significant improvements in terms of security strength, key connectivity, scalability, communication and storage overhead, and enables efficient secure rekeying.

Security weaknesses of a signature scheme and authenticated key agreement protocols

At ACISP 2012, a novel deterministic identity-based (aggregate) signature scheme was proposed that does not rely on bilinear pairing. The scheme was formally proven to be existentially unforgeable under an adaptive chosen message and identity attack. The security was proven under the strong RSA assumption in the random oracle model. In this paper, unfortunately, we show that the signature scheme is universally forgeable, i.e., an adversary can recover the private key of a user and use it to generate forged signatures on any messages of its choice having on average eight genuine signatures. This means, that realizing a deterministic identity-based signature scheme in composite order groups is still an open problem. In addition, we show that a preliminary version of the authenticated key exchange protocol proposed by Okamoto in his invited talk at ASIACRYPT 2007 is vulnerable to the key-compromise impersonation attack and therefore cannot be secure in the eCK model. We also show that the two-party identity-based key agreement protocol of Hölbl et al. is vulnerable to the unknown key-share attack.