One-Round Deniable Key Exchange with Perfect Forward Security

In response to the need for secure one-round authenticated key exchange protocols providing both perfect forward secrecy and full deniability, we put forward a new paradigm for constructing protocols from a Diffie-Hellman type protocol plus a non-interactive designated verifier proof of knowledge (DV-PoK) scheme. We define the notion of DV-PoK which is a variant of non-interactive zero-knowledge proof of knowledge, and provide an efficient DV-PoK scheme as a central technical building block of our protocol. The DV-PoK scheme possesses nice properties such as unforgeability and symmetry which help our protocol to achieve perfect forward secrecy and full deniability respectively. Moreover, the security properties are formally proved in the Canetti-Krawczyk model under the Gap Diffie-Hellman assumption. In sum, our protocol offers a remarkable combination of salient security properties and efficiency, and the notion of DV-PoK is of independent interests

On forward secrecy in one-round key exchange

Most one-round key exchange protocols provide only weak forward secrecy at best. Furthermore, one-round protocols with strong forward secrecy often break badly when faced with an adversary who can obtain ephemeral keys. We provide a characterisation of how strong forward secrecy can be achieved in one-round key exchange. Moreover, we show that protocols exist which provide strong forward secrecy and remain secure with weak forward secrecy even when the adversary is allowed to obtain ephemeral keys. We provide a compiler to achieve this for any existing secure protocol with weak forward secrecy

Beyond eCK: Perfect Forward Secrecy under Actor Compromise and Ephemeral-Key Reveal

We show that it is possible to achieve perfect forward secrecy in two-message or one-round key exchange (KE) protocols that satisfy even stronger security properties than provided by the extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) security model. In particular, we consider perfect forward secrecy in the presence of adversaries that can reveal ephemeral secret keys and the long-term secret keys of the actor of a session (similar to Key Compromise Impersonation). We propose two new game-based security models for KE protocols. First, we formalize a slightly stronger variant of the eCK security model that we call eCKw. Second, we integrate perfect forward secrecy into eCKw, which gives rise to the even stronger eCK-PFS model. We propose a security-strengthening transformation (i.e., a compiler) between our new models. Given a two-message Diffie-Hellman type protocol secure in eCKw, our transformation yields a two-message protocol that is secure in eCK-PFS. As an example, we show how our transformation can be applied to the NAXOS protocol

On the Limits of Authenticated Key Exchange Security with an Application to Bad Randomness

State-of-the-art authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols are proven secure in game-based security models. These models have considerably evolved in strength from the original Bellare-Rogaway model. However, so far only informal impossibility results, which suggest that no protocol can be secure against stronger adversaries, have been sketched. At the same time, there are many different security models being used, all of which aim to model the strongest possible adversary. In this paper we provide the first systematic analysis of the limits of game-based security models. Our analysis reveals that different security goals can be achieved in different relevant classes of AKE protocols. From our formal impossibility results, we derive strong security models for these protocol classes and give protocols that are secure in them. In particular, we analyse the security of AKE protocols in the presence of adversaries who can perform attacks based on chosen randomness, in which the adversary controls the randomness used in protocol sessions. Protocols that do not modify memory shared among sessions, which we call stateless protocols, are insecure against chosen-randomness attacks. We propose novel stateful protocols that provide resilience even against this worst case randomness failure, thereby weakening the security assumptions required on the random number generator

Tightly-Secure Authenticated Key Exchange, Revisited

We introduce new tightly-secure authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols that are extremely efficient, yet have only a constant security loss and can be instantiated in the random oracle model both from the standard DDH assumption and a subgroup assumption over RSA groups. These protocols can be deployed with optimal parameters, independent of the number of users or sessions, without the need to compensate a security loss with increased parameters and thus decreased computational efficiency. We use the standard “Single-Bit-Guess” AKE security (with forward secrecy and state corruption) requiring all challenge keys to be simultaneously pseudo-random. In contrast, most previous papers on tightly secure AKE protocols (Bader et al., TCC 2015; Gjøsteen and Jager, CRYPTO 2018; Liu et al., ASIACRYPT 2020) concentrated on a non-standard “Multi-Bit-Guess” AKE security which is known not to compose tightly with symmetric primitives to build a secure communication channel. Our key technical contribution is a new generic approach to construct tightly-secure AKE protocols based on non-committing key encapsulation mechanisms. The resulting DDH-based protocols are considerably more efficient than all previous constructions