Security of two recent constant-round password authenticated group key exchange schemes

When humans interact with machines in their daily networks, it is important that security of the communications is offered, and where the involved shared secrets used to achieve this are easily remembered by humans. Password-based authenticated group key exchange (PAGKE) schemes allow group users to share a session key based on a human-memorizable password. In this paper, we consider two PAGKE schemes that build on the seminal scheme of Burmester and Desmedt. Weshow an undetectable online dictionary attack on the first scheme, and exploit the partnering definition to break the key indistinguishability of the second scheme

Password-based group key exchange in a constant number of rounds

Abstract. With the development of grids, distributed applications are spread across multiple computing resources and require efficient security mechanisms among the processes. Although protocols for authenticated group Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocols seem to be the natural mechanisms for supporting these applications, current solutions are either limited by the use of public key infrastructures or by their scalability, requiring a number of rounds linear in the number of group members. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose in this paper the first provably-secure password-based constant-round group key exchange protocol. It is based on the protocol of Burmester and Desmedt and is provably-secure in the random-oracle and ideal-cipher models, under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. The new protocol is very efficient and fully scalable since it only requires four rounds of communication and four multi-exponentiations per user. Moreover, the new protocol avoids intricate authentication infrastructures by relying on passwords for authentication.

Input-shrinking functions: theory and application

In this thesis, we contribute to the emerging field of the Leakage-Resilient Cryptography by studying the problem of secure data storage on hardware that may leak information, introducing a new primitive, a leakage-resilient storage, and showing two different constructions of such storage scheme provably secure against a class of leakage functions that can depend only on some restricted part of the memory and against a class of computationally weak leakage functions, e.g. functions computable by small circuits, respectively. Our results come with instantiations and analysis of concrete parameters. Furthermore, as second contribution, we present our implementation in C programming language, using the cryptographic library of the OpenSSL project, of a two-party Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocol, which allows a client and a server, who share a huge secret file, to securely compute a shared key, providing client-to-server authentication, also in the presence of active attackers. Following the work of Cash et al. (TCC 2007), we based our construction on a Weak Key Exchange (WKE) protocol, developed in the BRM, and a Password-based Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocol secure in the Universally Composable (UC) framework. The WKE protocol showed by Cash et al. uses an explicit construction of averaging sampler, which uses less random bits than the random choice but does not seem to be efficiently implementable in practice. In this thesis, we propose a WKE protocol similar but simpler than that one of Cash et al.: our protocol uses more randomness than the Cash et al.'s one, as it simply uses random choice instead of averaging sampler, but we are able to show an efficient implementation of it. Moreover, we formally adapt the security analysis of the WKE protocol of Cash et al. to our WKE protocol. To complete our AKE protocol, we implement the PAKE protocol showed secure in the UC framework by Abdalla et al. (CT-RSA 2008), which is more efficient than the Canetti et al.'s UC-PAKE protocol (EuroCrypt 2005) used in Cash et al.'s work. In our implementation of the WKE protocol, to achieve small constant communication complexity and amount of randomness, we rely on the Random Oracle (RO) model. However, we would like to note that in our implementation of the AKE protocol we need also a UC-PAKE protocol which already relies on RO, as it is impossible to achieve UC-PAKE in the standard model. In our work we focus not only on the theoretical aspects of the area, providing formal models and proofs, but also on the practical ones, analyzing instantiations, concrete parameters and implementation of the proposed solutions, to contribute to bridge the gap between theory and practice in this field

(Password) authenticated key establishment: From 2-party to group

Proceedings of: TCC 2007: Fourth IACR Theory of Cryptography Conference, 21-24 February 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.A protocol compiler is described, that transforms any provably secure authenticated 2-party key establishment into a provably secure authenticated group key establishment with 2 more rounds of communication. The compiler introduces neither idealizing assumptions nor high-entropy secrets, e.g., for signing. In particular, applying the compiler to a password-authenticated 2-party key establishment without random oracle assumption, yields a password-authenticated group key establishment without random oracle assumption. Our main technical tools are non-interactive and non-malleable commitment schemes that can be implemented in the common reference string (CRS) model.The first author was supported in part by the European Commission through the IST Program under Contract IST-2002-507932 ECRYPT and by France Telecom R&D as part of the contract CIDRE, between France Telecom R&D and École normale supérieure

Sufficient condition for ephemeral key-leakage resilient tripartite key exchange

17th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, ACISP 2012; Wollongong, NSW; Australia; 9 July 2012 through 11 July 2012Tripartite (Diffie-Hellman) Key Exchange (3KE), introduced by Joux (ANTS-IV 2000), represents today the only known class of group key exchange protocols, in which computation of unauthenticated session keys requires one round and proceeds with minimal computation and communication overhead. The first one-round authenticated 3KE version that preserved the unique efficiency properties of the original protocol and strengthened its security towards resilience against leakage of ephemeral (session-dependent) secrets was proposed recently by Manulis, Suzuki, and Ustaoglu (ICISC 2009). In this work we explore sufficient conditions for building such protocols. We define a set of admissible polynomials and show how their construction generically implies 3KE protocols with the desired security and efficiency properties. Our result generalizes the previous 3KE protocol and gives rise to many new authenticated constructions, all of which enjoy forward secrecy and resilience to ephemeral key-leakage under the gap Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. © 2012 Springer-Verlag

One-Round Protocol for Two-Party Verifier-Based Password-Authenticated Key Exchange

Abstract. Password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) for two-party allows a client and a server communicating over a public network to share a session key using a human-memorable password only. PAKE protocols can be served as basic building blocks for constructing secure, complex, and higher-level protocols which were initially built upon the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. In this paper, we propose a provablysecure verifier-based PAKE protocol well suited with the TLS protocol which requires only a single round. The protocol is secure against attacks using compromised server's password file and known-key attacks, and provides forward secrecy, which is analyzed in the ideal hash model. This scheme matches the most efficient verifier-based PAKE protocol among those found in the literature. It is the first provably-secure one-round protocol for verifier-based PAKE in the two-party setting

A method for making password-based key exchange resilient to server compromise

Abstract. This paper considers the problem of password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) in a client-server setting, where the server authenticates using a stored password file, and it is desirable to maintain some degree of security even if the server is compromised. A PAKE scheme is said to be resilient to server compromise if an adversary who compromises the server must at least perform an offline dictionary attack to gain any advantage in impersonating a client. (Of course, offline dictionary attacks should be infeasible in the absence of server compromise.) One can see that this is the best security possible, since by definition the password file has enough information to allow one to play the role of the server, and thus to verify passwords in an offline dictionary attack. While some previous PAKE schemes have been proven resilient to server compromise, there was no known general technique to take an arbitrary PAKE scheme and make it provably resilient to server compromise. This paper presents a practical technique for doing so which requires essentially one extra round of communication and one signature computation/verification. We prove security in the universal composability framework by (1) defining a new functionality for PAKE with resilience to server compromise, (2) specifying a protocol combining this technique with a (basic) PAKE functionality, and (3) proving (in the random oracle model) that this protocol securely realizes the new functionality.