Security enhancement to a password-authenticated group key exchange protocol for mobile Ad-hoc networks

Group key exchange protocols allow a group of parties communicating over a public network to come up with a common secret key called a session key. Due to their critical role in building secure multicast channels, a number of group key exchange protocols have been suggested over the years for a variety of settings. Among these is the so-called NEKED protocol proposed by Byun et al. for password-authenticated group key exchange in mobile ad-hoc networks overseen by unmanned aerial vehicles. In the current work, we are concerned with improving the security of the NEKED protocol. We first show that the NEKED protocol is vulnerable not only to an attack against backward secrecy but also to an attack against password security. We then figure out how to eliminate the security vulnerabilities of NEKED.     

An off-line dictionary attack on a simple three-party key exchange protocol

Key exchange protocols allow two or more parties communicating over a public network to establish a common secret key called a session key. Due to their significance in building a secure communication channel, a number of key exchange protocols have been suggested over the years for a variety of settings. Among these is the so-called S-3PAKE protocol proposed by Lu and Cao for password-authenticated key exchange in the three-party setting. In the current work, we are concerned with the password security of the S-3PAKE protocol. We first show that S-3PAKE is vulnerable to an off-line dictionary attack in which an attacker exhaustively enumerates all possible passwords in an off-line manner to determine the correct one. We then figure out how to eliminate the security vulnerability of S-3PAKE.     

A secure and efficient password‐authenticated group key exchange protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Password‐authenticated group key exchange protocols enable communication parties to establish a common secret key (a session key) by only using short secret passwords. Such protocols have been receiving significant attention. This paper shows some security weaknesses in some recently proposed password‐authenticated group key exchange protocols. Furthermore, a secure and efficient password‐authenticated group key exchange protocol in mobile ad hoc networks is proposed. It only requires constant round to generate a group session key under the dynamic scenario. In other words, the overhead of key generation is independent of the size of a total group. Further, the security properties of our protocol are formally validated by a model checking tool called AVISPA. Security and performance analyses show that, compared with other related group key exchange schemes, the proposed protocol is also efficient for real‐world applications in enhancing the security over wireless communications. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A post quantum secure construction of an authentication protocol for satellite communication

Satellite's communication system is used to communicate under significant distance and circumstances where the other communication systems are not comfortable. Since all the data are exchanged over a public channel, so the security of the data is an essential component for the communicating parties. Both key exchange and authentication are two cryptographic tools to establish a secure communication between two parties. Currently, various kinds of authentication protocols are available to establish a secure network, but all of them depend on number–theoretical (discrete logarithm problem/factorization assumption) hard assumptions. Due to Shor's and Grover's computing algorithm number theoretic assumptions are breakable by quantum computers. Although Kumar and Garg have proposed a quantum attack-resistant protocol for satellite communication, it cannot resist stolen smart card attack. We have analyzed that how Kumar and Garg is vulnerable to the stolen smart card attack using differential power analysis attack described in He et al and Chen and Chen. We have also analyzed the modified version of signal leakage attack and sometimes called improved signal leakage attack on Kumar and Garg's protocol. We have tried to construct a secure and efficient authentication protocol for satellites communication that is secure against quantum computing. This is more efficient as it requires only three messages of exchange. This paper includes security proof and performance of the proposed authentication and key agreement protocol.     

Cryptanalysis and improvement of the YAK protocol with formal security proof and security verification via Scyther

Hao proposed the YAK as a robust key agreement based on public‐key authentication, and the author claimed that the YAK protocol withstands all known attacks and therefore is secure against an extremely strong adversary. However, Toorani showed the security flaws in the YAK protocol. This paper shows that the YAK protocol cannot withstand the known key security attack, and its consequences lead us to introduce a new key compromise impersonation attack, where an adversary is allowed to reveal both the shared static secret key between two‐party participation and the ephemeral private key of the initiator party in order to mount this attack. In addition, we present a new security model that covers these attacks against an extremely strong adversary. Moreover, we propose an improved YAK protocol to remedy these attacks and the previous attacks mentioned by Toorani on the YAK protocol, and the proposed protocol uses a verification mechanism in its block design that provides entity authentication and key confirmation. Meanwhile, we show that the proposed protocol is secure in the proposed formal security model under the gap Diffie‐Hellman assumption and the random oracle assumption. Moreover, we verify the security of the proposed protocol and YAK protocol by using an automatic verification method such as the Scyther tool, and the verification result shows that the security claims of the proposed protocol are proven, in contrast to those of the YAK protocol, which are not proven. The security and performance comparisons show that the improved YAK protocol outperforms previous related protocols.     

Security analysis of two lightweight RFID authentication protocols

One of the key problems in radio frequency identification (RFID) is security and privacy. Many RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to preserve security and privacy of the system. Nevertheless, most of these protocols are analyzed and it is shown that they cannot provide security against some RFID attacks. Strong authentication and strong integrity (SASI) is the first ultra-lightweight authentication protocol introduced rotation shift operation and RFID authentication protocol with permutation (RAPP) is a new ultra-lightweight authentication protocol with permutation. In this paper, we give the security analysis on these two protocols. An active attack is presented on RAPP, and using the property of the left rotation and permutation operations, we can deduce the relationship of bits of random number or secret keys at different positions, thus obtain all the secrets shared by the reader and the tag. A passive full-disclosure attack is proposed on SASI. Using SASI’s construction weakness, our attack can reveal all the secrets shared by the reader and tag by eavesdropping about 48 rounds of the authentication messages.     

Cryptanalysis and improvement of a three‐party password‐based authenticated key exchange protocol with user anonymity using extended chaotic maps

Three‐party password‐authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocols allow two clients to agree on a secret session key through a server via a public channel. 3PAKE protocols have been designed using different arithmetic aspects including chaotic maps. Recently, Lee et al. proposed a 3PAKE protocol using Chebyshev chaotic maps and claimed that their protocol has low computation and communication cost and can also resist against numerous attacks. However, this paper shows that in spite of the computation and communication efficiency of the Lee et al. protocol, it is not secure against the modification attack. To conquer this security weakness, we propose a simple countermeasure, which maintains the computation and communication efficiency of the Lee et al. protocol. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An efficient chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol with provable security

Key agreement protocol is an important cryptographic primitive, which allows 2 parties to establish a secure session in an open network environment. A various of key agreement protocols were proposed. Nowadays, there still exists some other security flaws waiting to be solved. Owing to reduce the computational and communication costs and improve the security, chaotic map has been studied in‐depth and treated as a good solution. Recently, Liu et al proposed a chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol and demonstrated that it can defend denial‐of‐service attack and replay attack. We found, however, it cannot resist off‐line password‐guessing attack, and it also has some other security flaws. In this paper, we propose an improved chaos‐based 2‐party key agreement protocol. The results prove that the protocol can solve the threats of off‐line password‐guessing attack and other security flaws in the security proof section. What is more, performance analysis shows that the computational cost of the improved protocol is lower than Liu et al protocol.     

A lightweight anonymous two‐factor authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV), as the next generation of transportation systems, tries to make highway and public transportation more secure than used to be. In this system, users use public channels for their communication so they can be the victims of passive or active attacks. Therefore, a secure authentication protocol is essential for IoV; consequently, many protocols are presented to provide secure authentication for IoV. In 2018, Yu et al proposed a secure authentication protocol for WSNs in vehicular communications and claimed that their protocol could satisfy all crucial security features of a secure authentication protocol. Unfortunately, we found that their protocol is susceptible to sensor capture attack, user traceability attack, user impersonation attack, and offline sink node's secret key guessing attack. In this paper, we propose a new authentication protocol for IoV which can solve the weaknesses of Yu et al's protocol. Our protocol not only provides anonymous user registration phase and revocation smart card phase but also uses the biometric template in place of the password. We use both Burrow‐Abadi‐Needham (BAN) logic and real‐or‐random (ROR) model to present the formal analysis of our protocol. Finally, we compare our protocol with other existing related protocols in terms of security features and computation overhead. The results prove that our protocol can provide more security features and it is usable for IoV system.     

Scalable and fault‐tolerant key agreement protocol for dynamic groups

With the widespread use of the Internet, the popularity of group communication‐based applications has grown considerably. Since most communications over the Internet involve the traversal of insecure networks, basic security services are necessary for these collaborative applications. These security services can be facilitated if the authorized group members share a common secret. In such distributed applications, key agreement protocols are preferred to key distribution protocols. In the past two decades, there have been many proposals for key agreement protocols. Most of these protocols are not efficient and limit the size of the underlying group. In this paper, we consider the scalability problem in group key agreement protocols. We propose a novel framework based on extension of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol. The efficiency of our protocol comes from the clustering of the group members, where the common session key is established collaboratively by all participants. We present the auxiliary protocols needed when the membership changes. We show that our protocol is superior in complexity in both communication and computation overheads required to generate the session key. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

协议认证性安全属性测试方法

认证性建立通信双方的信任关系,是安全通信的重要保障.传统的协议测试方法只关注协议功能的正确性,无法满足认证性等安全属性测试的要求.因此,提出了一种针对协议认证性的安全属性测试方法,利用带目标集合的有限状态机模型SPG-EFSM来扩展描述协议安全属性,并在攻击场景分类的基础上设计了认证攻击算法.通过攻击算法找到了Woo-lam协议和μTESLA协议的认证性漏洞,该方法具有可行性、覆盖率高等特点.     

A New Secure Authenticated Group Key Transfer Protocol

Group key transfer protocols depend on a mutually trusted key generation center (KGC) to generate group keys and transport group keys to all group members secretly. Generally, KGC encrypts group keys under another secret key shared with each user during registration. In this paper, we propose a novel secure authenticated group key transfer protocol using a linear secret sharing scheme (LSSS) and ElGamal cryptosystem, where KGC broadcasts group key information to all group members. The confidentiality of this transformation is guaranteed by this LSSS and ElGamal cryptosystem. We also provide authentication for transporting this group key. Goals and security threats of our protocol are analyzed in detail.     

A new authenticated group key agreement in a mobile environment

A group key agreement protocol enables a group of communicating parties over an untrusted, open network to come up with a common secret key. It is designed to achieve secure group communication, which is an important research issue for mobile communication. In 2007, Tseng proposed a new group key agreement protocol to achieve secure group communication for a mobile environment. Its security is based on the decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption. It remedies the security weakness of the protocol of Nam et al. in which participants cannot confirm that their contributions were actually involved in the group key. Unfortunately, Tseng’s protocol is a nonauthenticated protocol that cannot ensure the validity of the transmitted messages. In this paper, the authors shall propose a new authenticated group key agreement to remedy it. It is based on bilinear pairings. We shall prove the security of the proposed protocol under the bilinear computational Diffie–Hellman assumption. It is also proven to a contributory group key agreement protocol.     

An ECC‐based authenticated group key exchange protocol in IBE framework

With the rapid demand for various increasing applications, the internet users require a common secret key to communicate among a group. The traditional key exchange protocols involve a trusted key generation center for generation and distribution of the group key among the various group members. Therefore, the establishment of a trusted key generation center server and the generation (and distribution) of common session key require an extra overhead. To avoid this difficulty, a number of group key exchange protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, these protocols are vulnerable to many attacks and have a high computational and communication cost. In this paper, we present an elliptic curve cryptography–based authenticated group key exchange (ECC‐AGKE) protocol, which provides better security and has lower computational cost compared to related proposed schemes. Further, a complexity reduction method is deployed to reduce the overall complexity of the proposed elliptic curve cryptography–based authenticated group key exchange protocol. The security of proposed work is ensured by the properties of elliptic curves. A security adversarial model is given and an extensive formal security analysis against our claim is done in the random oracle model. We also made a comparison of our proposed protocol with similar works and found that ours have better complexity, security and efficiency over others.     

Session-Key Generation Using Human Passwords Only

We present session-key generation protocols in a model where the legitimate parties share only a human-memorizable password, and there is no additional set-up assumption in the network. Our protocol is proven secure under the assumption that enhanced trapdoor permutations exist. The security guarantee holds with respect to probabilistic polynomial-time adversaries that control the communication channel (between the parties), and may omit, insert, and modify messages at their choice. Loosely speaking, the effect of such an adversary that attacks an execution of our protocol is comparable with an attack in which an adversary is only allowed to make a constant number of queries of the form "is w the password of Party A." We stress that the result holds also in case the passwords are selected at random from a small dictionary so that it is feasible (for the adversary) to scan the entire directory. We note that prior to our result, it was not known whether or not such protocols were attainable without the use of random oracles or additional set-up assumptions.     

Verifiable three-party secure key exchange protocol based on eigenvalue

In order to solve the problem that the traditional key exchange protocol,which was not flexible enough and flawed in security,cannot provide the function of three-party key negotiation,firstly,a simple and flexible three-party key exchange scheme that can resist man-in-the-middle attacks was proposed with the help of secret matrix eigenvalues.However,the validity of key exchange cannot be verified by the scheme,and counterfeiting by middlemen can’t be prevented.Then based on it,the secret matrix was reconstructed,where the matrix order was a large even number,and all the eigenvalues appeared in pairs,similar to the diagonal matrix.Based on the special secret matrix,the verification part which can be used to verify the legitimacy of the communication party was introduced to the scheme,and the verifiable three-party key exchange protocol based on the eigenvalue was given.The protocol not only solved the problem of three-party key exchange,but also verified identity legitimacy.It is proved that it’s feasible to design a three-party key exchange protocol by the eigenvalue.The final protocol is both secure and efficient.     

一种适用于非平衡无线网络的组密钥交换协议

组认证密钥交换协议允许两方或多方用户通过公开的信道协商出共享的组会话密钥。针对非平衡无线网络中用户计算能力强弱不等的情况,该文提出一种适用于非平衡无线网络的组组认证密钥交换协议。该协议不但可以抵抗临时密钥泄露所带来的安全隐患,而且任意两个组中用户可以根据需要使用先前组通信消息计算独立于组会话密钥的两方会话密钥。与已有非平衡网络组密钥交换协议相比,该协议具有更高的安全性和实用性并且在随机预言模型下是可证安全的。     

基于秘密认证的可验证量子秘密共享协议

该文针对量子秘密共享协议难以抵抗内部成员欺骗攻击的问题，采用秘密认证的方法提出可验证量子秘密共享协议的一般性模型，基于Bell态双粒子变换提出一种新验证算法，并以此给出一个新的可验证量子秘密共享协议。与现有的量子秘密共享协议的验证算法相比，新验证算法既能有效抵抗内部成员欺骗攻击等典型的攻击策略，又可大幅提升协议效率，而且可以与现有量子秘密共享协议相结合，具备很好的可扩展性。     

基于扩展串空间模型的新型安全协议拒绝服务分析形式化理论

Denial of Service (DoS) attack, especially Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, is one of the greatest threats to Internet. Much research has been done for it by now, however, it is always concentrated in the behaviors of the network and can not deal with the problem exactly. In this paper, we start from the security of the protocol, then we propose a novel theory for security protocol analysis of Denial of Service in order to deal with the DoS attack. We first introduce the conception of weighted graph to extend the strand space model, then we extend the penetrator model and define the goal of anti-DoS attack through the conception of the DoS-stop protocol, finally we propose two kinds of DoS test model and erect the novel formal theory for security protocol analysis of Denial of Service. Our new formal theory is applied in two example protocols. It is proved that the Internet key exchange (IKE) easily suffers from the DoS attacks, and the efficient DoSresistant secure key exchange protocol (JFK) is resistant against DoS attack for the server, respectively.     

An efficient two‐party authentication key exchange protocol for mobile environment

The primary goal of this research is to ensure secure communications by client‐server architectures in mobile environment. Although various two‐party authentication key exchange protocols are proposed and claimed to be resistant to a variety of attacks, studies have shown that various loopholes exist in these protocols. What's more, many two‐party authentication key exchange protocols use timestamp to prevent the replay attack and transmit the user's identity in plaintext form. Obviously, these methods will lead to the clock synchronization problem and user's anonymity problem. Fortunately, the three‐way challenged‐response handshake technique and masking user's original identity with a secret hash value used in our study address these problems well. Of course, the proposed protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography supports flawless mutual authentication of participants, agreement of session key, impersonation attack resistance, replay attack resistance, and prefect forward secrecy, as well. The analyses in the aspects of efficiency and security show that the proposed protocol is a better choice for mobile users.