Password Mistyping in Two-Factor-Authenticated Key Exchange

Abstract: We study the problem of Key Exchange (KE), where authentication is two-factor and based on both electronically stored long keys and human-supplied credentials (passwords or biometrics). The latter credential has low entropy and may be adversarily mistyped. Our main contribution is the first formal treatment of mistyping in this setting. Ensuring security in presence of mistyping is subtle. We show mistyping-related limitations of previous KE definitions and constructions. We concentrate on the practical two-factor authenticated KE setting where servers exchange keys with clients, who use short passwords (memorized) and long cryptographic keys (stored on a card). Our work is thus a natural generalization of Halevi-Krawczyk and Kolesnikov-Rackoff. We discuss the challenges that arise due to mistyping. We propose the first KE definitions in this setting, and formally discuss their guarantees. We present efficient KE protocols and prove their security

On the Impossibility of Basing Identity Based Encryption on Trapdoor Permutations

We ask whether an Identity Based Encryption (IBE) sys-tem can be built from simpler public-key primitives. We show that there is no black-box construction of IBE from Trapdoor Permutations (TDP) or even from Chosen Ci-phertext Secure Public Key Encryption (CCA-PKE). These black-box separation results are based on an essential prop-erty of IBE, namely that an IBE system is able to compress exponentially many public-keys into a short public parame-ters string. 1

How powerful are the DDH hard groups?

The question whether Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) can be based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption is one of the most prominent questions in Cryptography related to DDH. We study limitations on the use of the DDH assumption in cryptographic constructions, and show that it is impossible to construct a secure Identity-Based Encryption system using, in a black box way, only the DDH (or similar) assumption about a group. Our impossibility result is set in the generic groups model, where we describe an attack on any IBE construction that relies on oracle access to the group operation of randomly labelled group elements -- a model that formalizes naturally DDH hardness. The vast majority of existing separation results typically give separation from general primitives, whereas we separate a primitive from a class of number theoretic hardness assumptions. Accordingly, we face challenges in creating an attack algorithm that will work against constructions which leverage the underlying algebraic structure of the group. In fact, we know that this algebraic structure is powerful enough to provide generic constructions for several powerful primitives including oblivious transfer and chosen ciphertext secure public-key cryptosystems (note that an IBE generalizes such systems). Technically, we explore statistical properties of the group algebra associated with a DDH oracle, which can be of independent interest

Context-Bounded Analysis For Concurrent Programs With Dynamic Creation of Threads

Context-bounded analysis has been shown to be both efficient and effective at finding bugs in concurrent programs. According to its original definition, context-bounded analysis explores all behaviors of a concurrent program up to some fixed number of context switches between threads. This definition is inadequate for programs that create threads dynamically because bounding the number of context switches in a computation also bounds the number of threads involved in the computation. In this paper, we propose a more general definition of context-bounded analysis useful for programs with dynamic thread creation. The idea is to bound the number of context switches for each thread instead of bounding the number of switches of all threads. We consider several variants based on this new definition, and we establish decidability and complexity results for the analysis induced by them

On ``identities\u27\u27, ``names\u27\u27, ``NAMES\u27\u27, ``ROLES\u27\u27 and Security: A Manifesto

There is a great deal of confusion in the cryptology literature relating to various identity related issues. By ``names\u27\u27 (lower case), we are referring to informal, personal ways that we indicate others; by ``NAMES\u27\u27 (upper case) we are referring to official ways that we use to indicate others. Both of these concepts are often confused with ``identity\u27\u27, which is something else altogether, and with ``ROLES\u27\u27. These confusions can lead to insecurities in key exchange as well as in other internet activities that relate to identity. We discuss why we should not use names in protocols and why we \textit{cannot} use identities. We discuss why, in a public-key infrastructure, we need to use NAMES in key-exchange protocols, and how they should be chosen and why they have to be unique, and why we should \textit{not} use NAMES in session protocols. We also argue for the importance of secure ROLEs in key-exchange protocols