Cryptanalysis and enhancements of efficient three‐party password‐based key exchange scheme

This chapter explains the elements of key exchange, specifically the steps in a key exchange protocol, the parties that are involved and the messages which may be sent. It details key exchange security models and protocols, considering first the simpler case of unauthenticated key exchange before turning to authenticated protocols. The chapter deals with key exchange protocols designed to be secure against a passive adversary. It examines that unauthenticated protocols may be used as building blocks for authenticated key exchange protocols. Key exchange protocols that allow parties to verify the identity of other participating parties are called authenticated key exchange protocols. Key exchange has a long history and a vast literature, yet remains a very active research area with significant practical impact. It is inevitable that as new computational assumptions emerge as the basis for cryptographic security, so will their use in key exchange be relevant.

In smart grid, key exchange protocols play a vital role in providing secure channels to read consumption reports from the smart meters. Thus far, several key exchange schemes have been proposed for the networked smart meters. However, for the first time, quite recently, Sha et al . have presented an interesting two-phase authentication and key agreement scheme that exclusively aims at the isolated smart meters. In their scheme, they have properly addressed the computationally constrained smart meters by offering a lightweight key exchange protocol. Nevertheless, after meticulous observation, we found that their proposed scheme cannot resist the desynchronization attack and cannot provide the perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, there are some other weaknesses in their scheme. As a result, to tackle the existing security challenges, in this paper, by utilization of the extended Chebyshev chaotic maps, we propose an efficient anonymous password-authenticated key exchange protocol that not only is free from the limitations of Sha et al .'s scheme, but also provides the anonymity. The security analysis in the random oracle model and using the widely accepted ProVerif tool besides the computational and communication costs comparison demonstrate that the proposed scheme has reached a proper level of efficiency without sacrificing the desired security properties.

In three-party password authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol, since two users use their passwords to establish a secure session key over an insecure communication channel with the help of the trusted server, such a protocol may suffer the password guessing attacks and the server has to maintain the password table. To eliminate the shortages of password-based AKE protocol, very recently, according to chaotic maps, Lee et al. [2015 Nonlinear Dyn. 79 2485] proposed a first three-party-authenticated key exchange scheme without using passwords, and claimed its security by providing a well-organized BAN logic test. Unfortunately, their protocol cannot resist impersonation attack, which is demonstrated in the present paper. To overcome their security weakness, by using chaotic maps, we propose a biometrics-based anonymous three-party AKE protocol with the same advantages. Further, we use the pi calculus-based formal verification tool ProVerif to show that our AKE protocol achieves authentication, security and anonymity, and an acceptable efficiency.

The key exchange protocol is the most important cryptography mechanism to protect end-to-end communications by the secret session key encryption. This paper focuses on the four-party key exchange protocol in a environment in which two clients (or UEs) are registered under two distinct servers. We propose a Three-Way Key Exchange and Agreement Protocol, denoted by TW-KEAP. It makes two communication parties have a secret session key to protect their subsequent communications on an efficient way, and intends the servers to involve with the key exchange procedure to derive the session key for the lawful interception support. Security analyses show that it provides mutual authentication, replay attack protection and perfect forward secrecy. Furthermore, the TW-KEAP has not only the shortest total service time based on the experimental results but also the shortest queuing delay from the queuing model analyses, as compared with current alternatives.

After going through past research, it is observed that the security of data depends on five important key features such as authentication, data Integrity, mutual authentication between two parties, non-repudiation, and key exchange algorithm. Even if one of these features fail then it may breach security in real-world scenarios. The Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE) algorithm allows securing one feature called key exchange in the cryptography field. However, this key exchange algorithm is unable to provide authentication. As a result, this key exchange scheme is prone to a hostile attack named as Man-In-The-Middle Attack (MITM). To solve this type of attack, a novel algorithm has been proposed called modification of the DHKE algorithm. In this algorithm, they claim that the MITM attack on classical DHKE can be prevented by applying the necessary functionalities like encryption and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP). Although, after going through result analysis and working techniques, it is observed that the modified DHKE algorithm is still suffering from MITM attack. In this paper, the main objective is to develop an algorithm for finding out this type of security flaw in the existing modified DH algorithm which includes the concept of required authentication and encryption functions and able to perform the MITM attack on the existing modified DHKE algorithm.

In cryptography, the key exchange protocol is very important before starting secure communication. Both parties will use an asymmetric key algorithm to exchange their keys for encryption and decryption. One of the methods to securely exchange the keys is Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE) protocol. DHKE allows both parties to exchange their keys over the insecure public channel safely. However, DHKE protocol does not authenticate the message, making it easily exposed to third-party interruptions like Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack. Therefore, Station to Station (STS) protocols was introduced after modifying the DHKE protocol and adding authentication elements. Thus, this paper proposes to provide the authentication of the STS protocol by using Lamport Digital Signature Scheme. Lamport Digital Signature Scheme, also known as Lamport one-time signature scheme, gives very strong security because it can be built from any cryptographically secure one-way function and usually uses a cryptographic hash function. The results from the study are STS protocol algorithms that provide a verification scheme using the Lamport Digital Signature Scheme. As a result, both parties will obtain a common key for encryption and decryption, in which both parties play a role by using their respective digital signature for verification within the STS of this protocol

Security issues play an important role in modern communication worlds. Via distrusted networks, exchanged messages need to be encrypted by a session key for security requirements. Session keys are preferred to be generated by communication parties, and how to authenticate the other communication party is an important problem needed to be solved. In three-party encrypted key exchange (3PEKE) protocols, a special type of indirect-authenticated protocols, a trusted third party is involved to have two communication parties be able to authenticate each other and negotiate one session key. In 2008, Yoon and Yoo proposed a three-party encrypted key exchange protocol and claimed their protocol provides a more secure way for exchanging messages. Unfortunately, we find that their protocol suffers from undetectable one-line password guessing attacks. In this manuscript, we first review the important related works and show how to mount attacks on Yoon and Yoo’s 3PEKE protocol

Diffie-Hellman (D-H) key exchange protocol, first published in 1976 is one of the most distinguished and widely used secured key exchange protocols. The protocol makes it possible to exchange a symmetric key between two parties over an unsecured communication channel without pre-agreement of any shared secret. The D-H key exchange protocol however requires a pre-set public parameters P (a large prime) and g a generator of ℤp to be public i.e. known to all users of the system. This paper proposes a key exchange mechanism without any public parameter. Unlike D-H key exchange mechanism our scheme uses encryption to transmit intermediate data during key exchange stage, thus it is non-vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attach.

Nicanfar and Leung proposed a multilayer consensus elliptic curve based password authenticated key-exchange (MCEPAK) protocol for smart grid. They claimed that their protocol is secure against possible attacks. In this paper, we show that the MCEPAK protocol is vulnerable to the dictionary attack and an adversary can obtain the passwords of the appliances by eavesdropping the communicated messages in the protocol. Moreover, we state that the passwords can be discovered by curious operators of the building area networks and the neighbor area networks. Theses weaknesses motivated us to introduce a chaotic maps based authenticated key exchange protocol for smart grid. To the best of our knowledge, the chaotic maps based key exchange protocol has not yet been devised for smart grid and the same objective has been fulfilled in this paper. In addition, we prove the security of the proposed protocol by a formal analysis.

The analysis of real-world protocols, in particular key exchange protocols and protocols building on these protocols, is a very complex, error-prone, and tedious task. Besides the complexity of the protocols itself, one important reason for this is that the security of the protocols has to be reduced to the security of the underlying cryptographic primitives for every protocol time and again. We would therefore like to get rid of reduction proofs for real-world key exchange protocols as much as possible and in many cases altogether, also for higher-level protocols which use the exchanged keys. So far some first steps have been taken in this direction. But existing work is still quite limited, and, for example, does not support Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange, a prevalent cryptographic primitive for real-world protocols. In this paper, building on work by Kusters and Tuengerthal, we provide an ideal functionality in the universal composability setting which supports several common cryptographic primitives, including DH key exchange. This functionality helps to avoid reduction proofs in the analysis of real-world protocols and often eliminates them completely. We also propose a new general ideal key exchange functionality which allows higherlevel protocols to use exchanged keys in an ideal way. As a proof of concept, we apply our framework to three practical DH key exchange protocols, namely ISO 9798-3, SIGMA, and OPTLS.

The main problem associated with using symmetric/ asymmetric keys is how to securely store and exchange the keys between the parties over open networks particularly in the open environment such as cloud computing. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) have been providing a practical solution for session key exchange for loads of web services. The key limitation of PKI solution is not only the need for a trusted third partly (e.g. certificate authority) but also the absent link between data owner and the encryption keys. The latter is arguably more important where accessing data needs to be linked with identify of the owner. Currently available key exchange protocols depend on using trusted couriers or secure channels, which can be subject to man-in-the-middle attack and various other attacks. This paper proposes a new protocol for Key Exchange using Biometric Identity Based Encryption (KE-BIBE) that enables parties to securely exchange cryptographic keys even an adversary is monitoring the communication channel between the parties. The proposed protocol combines biometrics with IBE in order to provide a secure way to access symmetric keys based on the identity of the users in unsecure environment. In the KE-BIOBE protocol, the message is first encrypted by the data owner using a traditional symmetric key before migrating it to a cloud storage. The symmetric key is then encrypted using public biometrics of the users selected by data owner to decrypt the message based on Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption. Only the selected users will be able to decrypt the message by providing a fresh sample of their biometric data. The paper argues that the proposed solution eliminates the needs for a key distribution centre in traditional cryptography. It will also give data owner the power of finegrained sharing of encrypted data by control who can access their data.

Abstract—Modular design is a common approach for dealing with complex tasks in modern cryptology. The critical of this approach is that designing a secure hybrid protocol. In this paper, we study password-based key exchange in the three-party setting within the UC framework and design a hybrid protocol that UC-securely realizes such task. That is, we firstly define an appropriate ideal functionality F3-pwKE for password-based three-party key exchange. Next we partition the task into two sub-tasks, three-party key distribution and password-based two-party key exchange, and propose relevant two ideal functionalities, F3-KD, FpwKE. Finally, we present a (F3-KD, FpwKE)-hybrid protocol for password-based three-party key exchange that is proved to be UC-secure with respect to non- adaptive party corruption.

A three-party password-based authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocol allows two clients registered with a trusted server to generate a common cryptographic key from their individual passwords shared only with the server. A key requirement for three-party PAKE protocols is to prevent an adversary from mounting a dictionary attack. This requirement must be met even when the adversary is a malicious (registered) client who can set up normal protocol sessions with other clients. This work revisits three existing three-party PAKE protocols, namely, Guo et al.’s (2008) protocol, Huang’s (2009) protocol, and Lee and Hwang’s (2010) protocol, and demonstrates that these protocols are not secure against offline and/or (undetectable) online dictionary attacks in the presence of a malicious client. The offline dictionary attack we present against Guo et al.’s protocol also applies to other similar protocols including Lee and Hwang’s protocol. We conclude with some suggestions on how to design a three-party PAKE protocol that is resistant against dictionary attacks.

The module learning with errors (MLWE) problem is one of the most promising candidates for constructing quantum-resistant cryptosystems. In this work, we propose an open-source framework to automatically adjust the level of parallelism for MLWE-based key exchange protocols to maximize the protocol execution efficiency. We observed that the number of key exchanges handled by primitive functions in parallel, and the dimension of the grids in the GPUs have significant impacts on both the latencies and throughputs of MLWE key exchange protocols. By properly adjusting the related parameters, in the experiments, we show that performance of MLWE based key exchange protocols can be improved across GPU platforms.

Security is a significant problem for communications in many scenarios in Internet of Things (IoT), such as military applications, electronic payment, wireless reprogramming of smart devices and so on. To protect communications, a secret key shared by the communicating parties is often required. Authenticated key exchange (AKE) is one of the most widely used methods to provide two or more parties communicating over an open network with a shared secret key. It has been studied for many years. A large number of protocols are available by now. The majority of existing AKE protocols require the two communicating parties execute equivalent computational tasks. However, many communications take place between two devices with significantly different computational capabilities, such as a cloud center and a mobile terminal, a gateway and a sensor node, and so on. Most available AKE protocols do not perfectly match these scenarios. To further address the security problem in communications between parties with fairly unbalanced computational capabilities, this thesis studies AKE protocols with unbalanced computational requirements on the communicating parties. We firstly propose a method to unbalance computations in the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange scheme. The resulting scheme is named as UECDH scheme. The method transfers one scalar multiplication from the computationally limited party to its more powerful communicating partner. It significantly reduces the computational burden on the limited party since scalar multiplication is the most time-consuming operation in the ECDH scheme. When applying the UECDH scheme to design AKE protocols, the biggest challenge is how to achieve authentication. Without authentication, two attacks (the man-in-the-middle attack and the impersonation attack) can be launched to the protocols. To achieve authentication, we introduce different measures that are suitable for a variety of use cases. Based on the authentication measures, we propose four suites of UECDH-based AKE protocols. The security of the protocols is discussed in detail. We also implement prototypes of these protocols and similar protocols in international standards including IEEE 802.15.6, Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 and Bluetooth 5.0. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance. The results show that in the same experimental platform, the proposed protocols are more friendly to the party with limited computational capability, and have better performance than similar protocols in these international standards.