Unknown Key-share Attack Research Articles

An identity‐based secure VANET communication system

AbstractVehicular ad‐hoc networks (VANETs) are mobile networks intended to connect vehicles and provide secure communication. In this direction, many researchers worked on establishing secure communication in VANETs. However, VANETs still face potential security and privacy issues due to network openness. In this paper, we proposed a secure communication system for VANETs with privacy, consisting of an Enhanced privacy‐preserving mutual authentication procedure for safe communication in V2V and deriving a session key using vehicle identities and time stamps the secret values (nonce) shared during the session. Further, we compared the proposed technique with existing techniques, and satisfactory results were obtained in favor of the proposed less computation. Finally, a formal security model is established to secure against unknown key share attacks, replay attacks, and key‐compromised impersonation attacks.

Automated verification of Telegram’s MTProto 2.0 in the symbolic model

MTProto 2.0 is the suite of security protocols for instant messaging at the core of the popular Telegram messenger application. In this paper we analyse MTProto 2.0 using ProVerif, a state-of-the-art symbolic security protocol verifier based on the Dolev–Yao model. We provide the first formal symbolic model of MTProto 2.0; in this model, we provide fully automated proofs of the soundness of authentication, normal chat, end-to-end encrypted chat, and rekeying mechanisms with respect to several security properties, including authentication, integrity, secrecy and perfect forward secrecy. At the same time, we discover that the rekeying protocol is vulnerable to an unknown key-share (UKS) attack. To achieve these results, we proceed in an incremental way: each protocol is examined in isolation, relying only on the guarantees provided by the previous ones and the robustness of the basic cryptographic primitives. The importance of this research is threefold. First, it proves the formal correctness of MTProto 2.0 with respect to most relevant security properties. Secondly, we isolate the aspects of cryptographic primitives that escape the symbolic model and thus require further investigation in the computational model. Finally, our modelisation can serve as a reference for the implementation and analysis of clients and servers.

Post-quantum lightweight identity-based two-party authenticated key exchange protocol for Internet of Vehicles with probable security

With Internet of Things (IoT) growing rapidly, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become an essential part of smart cities and has attracted the full attention of both academic and business communities. Because of the public transmission channel, the security and privacy in IoV have paid serious attention. In IoV, it is crucial to generate a secret session key among the various vehicles and road-side units (RSUs) so that they can share the confidential information over the public Internet. Thus, an authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol should be needed that can achieve the session key requirement in the IoV for secure communication. For this purpose, various AKA techniques has been designed using a number of different tools. Several existing AKA protocols either suffer from different attacks or inefficient for IoV environment due to its excessive communication and computational costs. Many such traditional schemes have used either Diffie–Hellman (DH) or prime factorization type hard problems. These hard problems are vulnerable to the futuristic technologies like quantum computer. Besides, existing quantum resistance AKA protocols use lattice cryptography for its security. However, these protocols either incurs an overhead of certificate management or have excessive communication and computational costs. Hence, there is a need of quantum resistance AKA protocols which removes the certificate overhead and also efficient for the IoV. In this paper, we propose a lattice-based two-party authenticated key agreement (LB-ID-2PAKA) protocol using identity-based cryptography (IBC). The lattice hard problems could resist the quantum computers and IBC could remove the overhead of certificate management. The security strength of proposed LB-ID-2PAKA protocol is analyzed under the random oracle model to show its robustness against the present as well as future quantum attacks. In addition, the resiliency against different security attacks such as man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, known-key security (K-KS), unknown key-share (UK-S) attack etc. are also included. Further, the performance analysis shows that the proposed LB-ID-2PAKA protocol outperforms the existing protocols and feasible for IoV applications.

An Improved Two-Party Authentication Key Exchange Protocol for Mobile Environment

Mobile environment has been used in large area range of network. In order to secure communication, a number of schemes have been proposed. The typical schemes are two-party authentication key exchange (2PAKE) protocols. It is based on elliptic curve cryptosystem. The main weakness of the protocol is that attackers have the ability to impersonate a legal user at any time. In addition, it is vulnerable to the public key problem and unknown key share attack. In this paper, we propose a 2PAKE protocol. Our protocol is indeed safer and meets the needs. Hence, the proposed protocol has a great contribution to the area of mobile environment.

Security analysis of SM2 key exchange protocol in TPM2.0

AbstractThe new released trusted platform module (TPM) specification, TPM2.0, adds cryptographic support for key exchange by providing SM2 authenticated key exchange (AKE) application programming interface (API) commands. Xu analyzed the SM2 AKE protocol and found that it was insecure in common computing environment by presenting two types of unknown key share attacks. Here, we present another design weakness of the SM2 AKE protocol, which might cause that the protocol cannot be proven secure in modern security models. We also analyze the security of SM2 AKE protocol in TPM2.0, whose running environment is very different and find that (i) it indeed gets some security improvements through the protection capability provided by the two SM2 AKE commands of TPM2.0 but (ii) it still has some weaknesses, which might lead to unknown key share and key‐compromise impersonation attacks because of the bad design of the TPM2.0 application programming interface. We solve the weaknesses of SM2 AKE protocol in TPM2.0 by slightly modifying one SM2 AKE command and finally give a formal proof of our solution in the Canetti and Krawczyk model. Our work shows that TPM2.0 could provide a proven secure SM2 AKE by slightly modifying one command. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Preventing Unknown Key-Share Attack using Cryptographic Bilinear Maps

Here we add a third pass to the two pass AK protocols, MTI/AO protocol and a two-pass protocol proposed by L. Law et al. using cryptographic bilinear maps. The added third pass provides additional key confirmation and also prevents the unknown key-share attack which could be successfully launched on the above mentioned two-pass protocols.

A secure e-mail protocol using ID-based FNS multicast mechanism

Electronic mail (e-mail) has been used to transfer various types of electronic data in Internet. Usually, a user has to send an e-mail to a specific group of users with a secure delivery mechanism. In this paper, a novel and feasible e-mail delivery mechanism using the secure multicast protocol with an ID-based factorial number structure (FNS) is proposed in the multicast system. In the proposed e-mail delivery mechanism, the e-mail is required to be encrypted before sending out in order to safeguard the message via a public channel, such as wire public switching communication links and wireless communication systems. Without loss generality, the public-key system is adopted in the proposed secure multicast system for a convenient and easy key management. The proposed scheme outperforms the existing methods for more easily to construct secure e-mail system. Furthermore, the security of the proposed scheme is analyzed, including replay attack, sender impersonation attack, unknown key-share attack, forgery attack and insider attack. Finally, the computation complexities of the proposed mechanism are discussed. The result shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the CRT-based secure e-mail scheme.

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.

SECURITY ENHANCEMENT ON SIMPLE THREE PARTY PAKE PROTOCOL

In the field of cryptography, the three-party authenticated key exchange protocol is an important tool, especially in the secure communication areas. In this protocol, two clients share a human-memorable password with a trusted server whereby the two clients receive a secure session key. Most recently, Huang proposed a simple and efficient three party password-based key exchange protocol. She claimed that the proposed protocol is secure against various attacks. However, Yoon and Yoo proved an undetectable online password guessing attack on Huang’s protocol. In the present paper, an unknown key share attack on Huang’s three party PAKE protocol using undetectable online password guessing attack is demonstrated. Additionally, an alternative protocol that eliminates this attack is proposed. Moreover, the proposed protocol requires only four message transmission rounds.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.41.1.842

Security Weaknesses in Harn-Lin and Dutta-Barua Protocols for Group Key Establishment

Key establishment protocols are fundamental for establishing secure communication channels over public insecure networks. Security must be given the topmost priority in the design of a key establishment protocol. In this work, we provide a security analysis on two recent key establishment protocols: Harn and Lin’s group key transfer protocol and Dutta and Barua’s group key agreement protocol. Our analysis shows that both the Harn-Lin protocol and the Dutta-Barua protocol have a flaw in their design and can be easily attacked. The attack we mount on the Harn-Lin protocol is a replay attack whereby a malicious user can obtain the long-term secrets of any other users. The Dutta-Barua protocol is vulnerable to an unknown key-share attack. For each of the two protocols, we present how to eliminate their security vulnerabilities. We also improve Dutta and Barua’s proof of security to make it valid against unknown key share attacks.

A Signcryption based Light Weight Key Exchange Protocol

Abstract Traditional cryptography based authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocols expose the problems of efficiency and privacy since signature-then-encryption is heavy to wireless communication special for flexible dynamic deployment, i.e., wireless mesh networks, wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, etc., in computational cost and communicational overhead and traditional digital signature allows anyone to verify its validity using the corresponding public key. In this paper, we propose a signcryption based light weight key exchange protocol named SLWKE which can provide resistance to traditional attacks, i.e., eavesdropping, deducing, replaying, interleaving, forging and repudiating, and unknown key-share attack and save computational cost by three modular calculations, i.e., one modular inversion, one modular addition and one modular multiplicative, included in a signature s and communicational overhead by secure length of IqI in comparison to signcryption based direct key exchange using a time-stamp protocol termed Dkeuts.

Provably secure three-party password authenticated key exchange protocol in the standard model

Three-party password authenticated key exchange protocol is a very practical mechanism to establish secure session key through authenticating each other with the help of a trusted server. Most three-party password authenticated key exchange protocols only guarantee security in the random oracle model. However, a random oracle based cryptographic construction may be insecure when the oracle is replaced by real function. Moreover, some previous unknown attacks appear with the advance of the adversary capability. Therefore, a suitable standard model which can imitate a wider variety of attack scenarios for 3PAKE protocol is needed. Aim at resisting dictionary attack, unknown key-share attack and password-compromise impersonation attack, an expanded standard model for 3PAKE protocol is given. Meanwhile, through applying ElGamal encryption scheme and pseudorandom function, a specific three-party password authenticated key exchange protocol is proposed. The security of the proposed protocol is proven in the new standard model. The result shows that the present protocol has stronger security by comparing with other existing protocols, which covers the following security properties: (1) semantic security, (2) key privacy, (3) client-to-server authentication, (4) mutual authentication, (5) resistance to various known attacks, and (6) forward security.

Privacy Enhanced Key Agreement for Public Safety Communication in Wireless Mesh Networks

With the requirements of mobility, flexibility, and rapid response, wireless mesh networks are widely used for emergency services to improve the efficiency of public safety communication to prevent or respond to incidents that harm or endanger persons or property. In this paper, we propose a practical scheme of key agreement with asymmetric encryption based on station-to-station protocol and a privacy enhanced scheme of key agreement with directed signature using the elliptic curve ElGamal cryptography for public safety communication in wireless mesh networks. In the result, only both participants can gain the shared secret key, however, any party else can not understand the key agreement process clearly. We analyze the properties of security and efficiency of the privacy enhanced scheme of key agreement in comparison to the station-to-station protocol and the practical scheme of key agreement with asymmetric encryption. The results of experiment show that the privacy enhanced scheme of key agreement can provide resistance to the unknown key-share attacks, privacy protection for sensitive information included in signature and better efficiency in terms of computational cost.

An Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol Using Isogenies Between Elliptic Curves

All the current public-key cryptosystems will become insecure when size of a quantum register is sufficient. An authenticated key agreement protocol, which is against the attack of quantum computer, is proposed. The proposed protocol can provide the security properties known session key security, forward security, resistance to key-compromise impersonation attack and to unknown key-share attack, key control. We also prove its security in a widely accepted model.

Cryptanalysis of simple three-party key exchange protocol (S-3PAKE)

Password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols allow parties to share secret keys in an authentic manner based on an easily memorizable password. Recently, Lu and Cao proposed a three-party password-authenticated key exchange protocol, so called S-3PAKE, based on ideas of the Abdalla and Pointcheval two-party SPAKE extended to three parties. S-3PAKE can be seen to have a structure alternative to that of another three-party PAKE protocol (3PAKE) by Abdalla and Pointcheval. Furthermore, a simple improvement to S-3PAKE was proposed very recently by Chung and Ku to resist the kind of attacks that applied to earlier versions of 3PAKE. In this paper, we show that S-3PAKE falls to unknown key-share attacks by any other client, and undetectable online dictionary attacks by any adversary. The latter attack equally applies to the recently improved S-3PAKE. Indeed, the provable security approach should be taken when designing PAKEs; and furthermore our results highlight that extra cautions still be exercised when defining models and constructing proofs in this direction.

Bilateral Unknown Key-Share Attacks in Key Agreement Protocols

Unknown Key-Share (UKS) resilience is a basic security attribute in au- thenticated key agreement protocols. In this paper we revisit the definitions of this attribute and the method of proving this attribute under the Bellare-Rogaway (BR) model in the literature. We propose a new type of UKS attack, which coerces two enti- ties A and B into sharing a key with each other but in fact A thinks that he is sharing the key with another entity C and B thinks that he is sharing the key with another entity D ,w hereC and D might or might not be the same entity. We call this attack a Bilateral Unknown Key-Share (BUKS) attack. We demonstrate that a few well-known authenticated key agreement protocols are vulnerable to this attack. We then explore a gap between the conventional BR-type proof and a BUKS adversary's behavior, and extend the BR model to cover the BUKS resilience attribute. At the end of the paper, we provide a general countermeasure and its security proof under the extended model and the assumption that a collision-resistance function exists.

Cryptanalysis of e-mail protocols providing perfect forward secrecy

Recently, two e-mail protocols were proposed claiming to provide perfect secrecy. These protocols use authentication and (Diffie-Hellman) key-exchange techniques, and as such, other standard security criteria besides perfect forward secrecy include key-replay resilience, known-key security, key freshness and unknown key-share resilience are expected too. In this paper, we show that the two protocols cannot resist replay attacks, and further that the first falls to unknown key-share attacks while the second fails to provide perfect forward secrecy, contrary to the designers' claims. Although the two protocols were intended by the designers to be more secure variants compared to the common e-mail protocol, our results show that being newer does not necessarily mean being more secure.

Provably Efficient Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Multi-Servers

An efficient and practical authenticated key agreement protocol based on the line of geometry is proposed in this paper. It is a good solution to provide authentication and confidentiality. Identity authentication and message confidentiality are two important issues for the open network environment. In the proposed protocol, the authorized user can access multi-servers securely by keeping only a weak password and a smart card. Owing to the limited memory of the smart card, the secret information stored in the smart card has a size independent of the number of servers to which it connects. The proposed protocol provides mutual authentication between the user and the server and enables them to establish a common session key to provide message confidentiality for each other. It can also resist the replay attack, the impersonation attack, the off-line dictionary attack, the known key attack, the unknown key share attack, the stolen verifier attack and the insider attack. The security of the proposed protocol will be demonstrated by the random oracle model. Furthermore, we use the logic analysis method to analyze the proposed protocol. This protocol does not use any overload cryptographic operations and requires less communicational and computational costs than the results obtained previously from the existing scholarship.

Vulnerabilities of generalized MQV key agreement protocol without using one-way hash functions

The MQV protocol is the first authenticated key agreement protocol which uses a digital signature to sign Diffie–Hellman public keys without using any one-way hash functions. Based on the MQV protocol, Harn and Lin proposed an authenticated multiple-key agreement protocol that enables two parties to establish multiple common secret keys in a single protocol run. But the protocol was subsequently found to be flawed. Tseng proposed a new generalized MQV key agreement protocol without using one-way hash functions to overcome the weaknesses of Harn–Lin's protocol. Recently, Shao showed that Teng's protocol is insecure against signature forgery attacks and then proposed an improved authenticated multiple-key agreement protocol to resist the attacks. In this paper we show that Shao's protocol is vulnerable to unknown key-share attacks. We also point out its another potential weakness.

Security Analysis of Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol Based on the q-th Root Problem

Johnston and Gemmell proposed an authenticated key exchange protocol based on the difficulty of the q-th root problem. They showed that it is provably secure against man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper we show that the protocol is insecure against an unknown key-share attack and does not achieve forward secrecy.