Dynamic group key agreement for resource-constrained devices using blockchains

Dynamic group key agreement (DGKA) protocols are one of the key security primitives to secure multiparty communications in decentralized and insecure environments while considering the instant changes in a communication group. However, with the ever-increasing number of connected devices, traditional DGKA protocols have performance challenges since each member in the group has to make several computationally intensive operations while verifying the keying materials to compute the resulting group key. To overcome this issue, we propose a new approach for DGKA protocols by utilizing Hyperledger Fabric framework as a blockchain platform. To this end, we migrate the communication and verification overhead of DGKA participants to the blockchain network in our developed scheme. This paradigm allows a flexible DGKA protocol that considers resource-constrained entities and trade-offs regarding distributed computation. According to our performance analysis, participants with low computing resources can efficiently utilize our protocol. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that our protocol has the same security features as other comparable protocols in the literature

A three round authenticated group key agreement protocol for ad hoc networks

International audienceGroup Key Agreement (GKA) protocols enable the participants to derive a key based on each one's contribution over a public network without any central authority. They also provide efficient ways to change the key when the participants change. While some of the proposed GKA protocols are too resource consuming for the constraint devices often present in ad hoc networks, others lack a formal security analysis. In this paper, we propose a simple, efficient and secure GKA protocol well-suited to ad hoc networks and present results of our implementation of the same in a prototype application

Overview of Key Agreement Protocols

The emphasis of this paper is to focus on key agreement. To this aim, we address a self-contained, up-to-date presentation of key agreement protocols at high level. We have attempted to provide a brief but fairly complete survey of all these schemes

CoCoA: Concurrent Continuous Group Key Agreement

Messaging platforms like Signal are widely deployed and provide strong security in an asynchronous setting. It is a challenging problem to construct a protocol with similar security guarantees that can \emph{efficiently} scale to large groups. A major bottleneck are the frequent key rotations users need to perform to achieve post compromise forward security. In current proposals -- most notably in TreeKEM (which is part of the IETF\u27s Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol draft) -- for users in a group of size $n$ to rotate their keys, they must each craft a message of size $\log(n)$ to be broadcast to the group using an (untrusted) delivery server. In larger groups, having users sequentially rotate their keys requires too much bandwidth (or takes too long), so variants allowing any $T \leq n$ users to simultaneously rotate their keys in just $2$ communication rounds have been suggested (e.g. Propose and Commit by MLS). Unfortunately, $2$-round concurrent updates are either damaging or expensive (or both); i.e. they either result in future operations being more costly (e.g. via blanking\u27\u27 or tainting\u27\u27) or are costly themselves requiring $\Omega(T)$ communication for each user [Bienstock et al., TCC\u2720]. In this paper we propose CoCoA; a scheme that allows for $T$ concurrent updates that are neither damaging nor costly. That is, they add no cost to future operations yet they only require $\Omega(\log^2(n))$ communication per user. To circumvent the [Bienstock et al.] lower bound, CoCoA increases the number of rounds needed to complete all updates from $2$ up to (at most) $\log(n)$; though typically fewer rounds are needed. The key insight of the protocol is the following: in the (non-concurrent version of) TreeKEM, a delivery server which gets $T$ concurrent update requests will approve one and reject the remaining $T-1$. In contrast, our server attempts to apply all of them. If more than one user requests to rotate the same key during a round, the server arbitrarily picks a winner. Surprisingly, we prove that regardless of how the server chooses the winners, all previously compromised users will recover after at most $\log(n)$ such update rounds. To keep the communication complexity low, CoCoA is a server-aided CGKA. That is, the delivery server no longer blindly forwards packets, but instead actively computes individualized packets tailored to each user. As the server is untrusted, this change requires us to develop new mechanisms ensuring robustness of the protocol

End-to-End Encrypted Group Messaging with Insider Security

Our society has become heavily dependent on electronic communication, and preserving the integrity of this communication has never been more important. Cryptography is a tool that can help to protect the security and privacy of these communications. Secure messaging protocols like OTR and Signal typically employ end-to-end encryption technology to mitigate some of the most egregious adversarial attacks, such as mass surveillance. However, the secure messaging protocols deployed today suffer from two major omissions: they do not natively support group conversations with three or more participants, and they do not fully defend against participants that behave maliciously. Secure messaging tools typically implement group conversations by establishing pairwise instances of a two-party secure messaging protocol, which limits their scalability and makes them vulnerable to insider attacks by malicious members of the group. Insiders can often perform attacks such as rendering the group permanently unusable, causing the state of the group to diverge for the other participants, or covertly remaining in the group after appearing to leave. It is increasingly important to prevent these insider attacks as group conversations become larger, because there are more potentially malicious participants. This dissertation introduces several new protocols that can be used to build modern communication tools with strong security and privacy properties, including resistance to insider attacks. Firstly, the dissertation addresses a weakness in current two-party secure messaging tools: malicious participants can leak portions of a conversation alongside cryptographic proof of authorship, undermining confidentiality. The dissertation introduces two new authenticated key exchange protocols, DAKEZ and XZDH, with deniability properties that can prevent this type of attack when integrated into a secure messaging protocol. DAKEZ provides strong deniability in interactive settings such as instant messaging, while XZDH provides deniability for non-interactive settings such as mobile messaging. These protocols are accompanied by composable security proofs. Secondly, the dissertation introduces Safehouse, a new protocol that can be used to implement secure group messaging tools for a wide range of applications. Safehouse solves the difficult cryptographic problems at the core of secure group messaging protocol design: it securely establishes and manages a shared encryption key for the group and ephemeral signing keys for the participants. These keys can be used to build chat rooms, team communication servers, video conferencing tools, and more. Safehouse enables a server to detect and reject protocol deviations, while still providing end-to-end encryption. This allows an honest server to completely prevent insider attacks launched by malicious participants. A malicious server can still perform a denial-of-service attack that renders the group unavailable or "forks" the group into subgroups that can never communicate again, but other attacks are prevented, even if the server colludes with a malicious participant. In particular, an adversary controlling the server and one or more participants cannot cause honest participants' group states to diverge (even in subtle ways) without also permanently preventing them from communicating, nor can the adversary arrange to covertly remain in the group after all of the malicious participants under its control are removed from the group. Safehouse supports non-interactive communication, dynamic group membership, mass membership changes, an invitation system, and secure property storage, while offering a variety of configurable security properties including forward secrecy, post-compromise security, long-term identity authentication, strong deniability, and anonymity preservation. The dissertation includes a complete proof-of-concept implementation of Safehouse and a sample application with a graphical client. Two sub-protocols of independent interest are also introduced: a new cryptographic primitive that can encrypt multiple private keys to several sets of recipients in a publicly verifiable and repeatable manner, and a round-efficient interactive group key exchange protocol that can instantiate multiple shared key pairs with a configurable knowledge relationship