Efficient One-round Key Exchange in the Standard Model

We consider one-round identity-based key exchange protocols secure in the standard model. The security analysis uses the powerful security model of Canetti and Krawczyk and a natural extension of it to the ID-based setting. It is shown how KEMs can be used in a generic way to obtain two different protocol designs with progressively stronger security guarantees. A detailed analysis of the performance of the protocols is included; surprisingly, when instantiated with specific KEM constructions, the resulting protocols are competitive with the best previous schemes that have proofs only in the random oracle model

One Round Group Key Exchange with Forward Security in the Standard Model

Constructing a one round group key exchange (GKE) protocol that provides forward secrecy is an open problem in the literature. In this paper, we investigate whether or not the security of one round GKE protocols can be enhanced with any form of forward secrecy without increasing the number of rounds. We apply the {\em key evolving} approach used for forward secure encryption/signature schemes and then model the notion of forward security for the first time for key exchange protocols. This notion is slightly weaker than forward secrecy, considered traditionally for key exchange protocols. We then revise an existing one round GKE protocol to propose a GKE protocol with forward security. In the security proof of the revised protocol we completely avoid reliance on the random oracle assumption that was needed for the proof of the base protocol. Our security proof can be directly applied to the base protocol, making it the most efficient one round GKE protocol secure in the standard model. Our one round GKE protocol is generically constructed from the primitive of forward secure encryption. We also propose a concrete forward secure encryption scheme with constant size ciphertext that can be used to efficiently instantiate our protocol

Strongly Secure One-round Group Authenticated Key Exchange in the Standard Model

One-round group authenticated key exchange (GAKE) protocols typically provide implicit authentication and appealing bind-width efficiency. As a special case of GAKE -- the pairing-based one-round tripartite authenticated key exchange (3AKE), recently gains much attention of research community due to its strong security. Several pairing-based one-round 3AKE protocols have recently been proposed to achieve provable security in the g-eCK model. In contrast to earlier GAKE models, the g-eCK model particularly formulates the security properties regarding resilience to the leakage of various combinations of long-term key and ephemeral session state, and provision of weak perfect forward secrecy in a single model. However, the g-eCK security proofs of previous protocols are only given under the random oracle model. In this work, we give a new construction for pairing-based one-round 3AKE protocol which is provably secure in the g-eCK model without random oracles. Security of proposed protocol is reduced to the hardness of Cube Bilinear Decisional Diffie-Hellman (CBDDH) problem for symmetric pairing. We also extend the proposed 3AKE scheme to a GAKE scheme with more than three group members, based on multilinear maps. We prove g-eCK security of our GAKE scheme in the standard model under the natural multilinear generalization of the CBDDH assumption

Design and analysis of group key exchange protocols

A group key exchange (GKE) protocol allows a set of parties to agree upon a common secret session key over a public network. In this thesis, we focus on designing efficient GKE protocols using public key techniques and appropriately revising security models for GKE protocols. For the purpose of modelling and analysing the security of GKE protocols we apply the widely accepted computational complexity approach. The contributions of the thesis to the area of GKE protocols are manifold. We propose the first GKE protocol that requires only one round of communication and is proven secure in the standard model. Our protocol is generically constructed from a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM). We also suggest an efficient KEM from the literature, which satisfies the underlying security notion, to instantiate the generic protocol. We then concentrate on enhancing the security of one-round GKE protocols. A new model of security for forward secure GKE protocols is introduced and a generic one-round GKE protocol with forward security is then presented. The security of this protocol is also proven in the standard model. We also propose an efficient forward secure encryption scheme that can be used to instantiate the generic GKE protocol. Our next contributions are to the security models of GKE protocols. We observe that the analysis of GKE protocols has not been as extensive as that of two-party key exchange protocols. Particularly, the security attribute of key compromise impersonation (KCI) resilience has so far been ignored for GKE protocols. We model the security of GKE protocols addressing KCI attacks by both outsider and insider adversaries. We then show that a few existing protocols are not secure against KCI attacks. A new proof of security for an existing GKE protocol is given under the revised model assuming random oracles. Subsequently, we treat the security of GKE protocols in the universal composability (UC) framework. We present a new UC ideal functionality for GKE protocols capturing the security attribute of contributiveness. An existing protocol with minor revisions is then shown to realize our functionality in the random oracle model. Finally, we explore the possibility of constructing GKE protocols in the attribute-based setting. We introduce the concept of attribute-based group key exchange (AB-GKE). A security model for AB-GKE and a one-round AB-GKE protocol satisfying our security notion are presented. The protocol is generically constructed from a new cryptographic primitive called encapsulation policy attribute-based KEM (EP-AB-KEM), which we introduce in this thesis. We also present a new EP-AB-KEM with a proof of security assuming generic groups and random oracles. The EP-AB-KEM can be used to instantiate our generic AB-GKE protocol

One-Round Key Exchange with Strong Security: An Efficient and Generic Construction in the Standard Model

One-round authenticated key exchange (ORKE) is an established research area, with many prominent protocol constructions like HMQV (Krawczyk, CRYPTO 2005) and Naxos (La Macchia et al., ProvSec 2007), and many slightly different, strong security models. Most constructions combine ephemeral and static Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE), in a manner often closely tied to the underlying security model. We give a generic construction of ORKE protocols from general assumptions, with security in the standard model, and in a strong security model where the attacker is even allowed to learn the randomness or the long-term secret of either party in the target session. The only restriction is that the attacker must not learn both the randomness and the long-term secret of one party of the target session, since this would allow him to recompute all internal states of this party, including the session key. This is the first such construction that does not rely on random oracles. The construction is intuitive, relatively simple, and efficient. It uses only standard primitives, namely non-interactive key exchange, a digital signature scheme, and a pseudorandom function, with standard security properties, as building blocks

Security Weakness in Two Authenticated Key Exchange Protocols

In ICA3PP 2009, Xinglan Zhang proposed two one-round authenticated key exchange protocols and proved their security in the standard model. In this paper, we analyze these two protocols and find that both of them exist some flaws

Group key exchange protocols withstanding ephemeral-key reveals

When a group key exchange protocol is executed, the session key is typically extracted from two types of secrets; long-term keys (for authentication) and freshly generated (often random) values. The leakage of this latter so-called ephemeral keys has been extensively analyzed in the 2-party case, yet very few works are concerned with it in the group setting. We provide a generic {group key exchange} construction that is strongly secure, meaning that the attacker is allowed to learn both long-term and ephemeral keys (but not both from the same participant, as this would trivially disclose the session key). Our design can be seen as a compiler, in the sense that it builds on a 2-party key exchange protocol which is strongly secure and transforms it into a strongly secure group key exchange protocol by adding only one extra round of communication. When applied to an existing 2-party protocol from Bergsma et al., the result is a 2-round group key exchange protocol which is strongly secure in the standard model, thus yielding the first construction with this property

A Cryptographic Analysis of the TLS 1.3 Handshake Protocol

We analyze the handshake protocol of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, version 1.3. We address both the full TLS 1.3 handshake (the one round-trip time mode, with signatures for authentication and (elliptic curve) Diffie–Hellman ephemeral ((EC)DHE) key exchange), and the abbreviated resumption/ PSK mode which uses a pre-shared key for authentication (with optional (EC)DHE key exchange and zero round-trip time key establishment). Our analysis in the reductionist security framework uses a multi-stage key exchange security model, where each of the many session keys derived in a single TLS 1.3 handshake is tagged with various properties (such as unauthenticated versus unilaterally authenticated versus mutually authenticated, whether it is intended to provide forward security, how it is used in the protocol, and whether the key is protected against replay attacks). We show that these TLS 1.3 handshake protocol modes establish session keys with their desired security properties under standard cryptographic assumptions

Oil Price Shocks and Monetary Policy Aggregates in Nigeria: A Structural VAR Approach

Studies have shown that the impact of oil price volatility varies significantly across countries and within the different sectors of a particular economy. The impact vary according to the prevailing state of an economy: whether the economy is a net importer or exporter of oil; the exchange rate regime; monetary policy framework; the vulnerability of the key sectors of the economy and the degree of openness of the economy. In this study, we have used both restricted and unrestricted structural VAR models to decompose the impact of oil price shocks. Using a seven-variable VAR matrix which include monetary policy aggregates, we forecast the impact of a one standard deviation innovation to oil price on inflation rate, money supply, interest rate, government expenditure, GDP per capita growth rate, exchange rate and manufacturing output over a ten-year period. We imposed identification restrictions on the VAR model to identify the structural parameters of the seven equations and show the variance decomposition analysis. The results shows that the second-round effects of oil price shocks may be transmitted to the other sectors of the economy through the government expenditure - inflation rate channels with significant direct impact on the real sector and other monetary aggregates.Oil Price Shocks; Monetary Policy; Vector autoregressive model

Smooth NIZK Arguments with Applications to Asymmetric UC-PAKE and Threshold-IBE

We introduce a novel notion of smooth (-verifier) non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZK) which parallels the familiar notion of smooth projective hash functions (SPHF). We also show that the recent single group element quasi-adaptive NIZK (QA-NIZK) of Jutla and Roy (CRYPTO 2014) for linear subspaces can be easily extended to be computationally smooth. One important distinction of the new notion from SPHFs is that in a smooth NIZK the public evaluation of the hash on a language member using the projection key does not require the witness of the language member, but instead just requires its NIZK proof. This has the remarkable consequence that in the Gennaro-Lindell paradigm of designing universally-composable password-authenticated key-exchange (UC-PAKE) protocols, if one replaces the traditionally employed SPHFs with the novel smooth QA-NIZK, one gets highly efficient UC-PAKE protocols that are secure even under dynamic corruption. This simpler and modular design methodology allows us to give the first single-round asymmetric UC-PAKE protocol, which is also secure under dynamic corruption in the erasure model. We also define a related concept of smooth signatures, which we show is black-box equivalent to identity-based encryption (IBE). The novel abstraction allows us to give the first threshold (private-key generation) fully-secure IBE in the standard model