Group Diffie-Hellman protocols for Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) are designed to provide a pool of players with a shared secret key which may later be used, for example, to achieve multicast message integrity. Over the years, several schemes have been offered. However, no formal treatment for this cryptographic problem has ever been suggested. In this paper, we present a security model for this problem and use it to precisely define AKE (with "implicit" authentication) as the fundamental goal, and the entity-authentication goal as well. We then define in this model the execution of an authenticated group Diffie-Hellman scheme and prove its security.

We consider the problem of authenticated group key exchange among n parties communicating over an insecure public network. A number of solutions to this problem have been proposed; however, all prior provably-secure solutions do not scale well and, in particular, require O(n) rounds. Our main contribution is the first scalable protocol for this problem along with a rigorous proof of security in the standard model under the DDH assumption; our protocol uses a constant number of rounds and requires only O(1) “full ” modular exponentiations per user. Toward this goal (and adapting work of Bellare, Canetti, and Krawczyk), we first present an efficient compiler that transforms any group key-exchange protocol secure against a passive eavesdropper to an authenticated protocol which is secure against an active adversary who controls all communication in the network. This compiler adds only one round and O(1) communication (per user) to the original scheme. We then prove secure — against a passive adversary — a variant of the two-round group key-exchange protocol of Burmester and Desmedt. Applying our compiler to this protocol results in a provably-secure three-round protocol for authenticated group key exchange which also achieves forward secrecy. 1

Abstract. We propose a way to establish peer-to-peer authenticated communications over an insecure channel by using an extra channel which can authenticate very short strings, e.g. 15 bits. We call this SAS-based authentication as for authentication based on Short Authenticated Strings. The extra channel uses a weak notion of authentication in which strings cannot be forged nor modi£ed, but whose delivery can be maliciously stalled, canceled, or replayed. Our protocol is optimal and relies on an extractable or equivocable commitment scheme. This approach offers an alternative (or complement) to public-key infrastructures, since we no longer need any central authority, and to password-based authenticated key exchange, since we no longer need to establish a con£dential password. It can be used to establish secure associations in ad-hoc networks. Applications could be the authentication of a public key (e.g. for SSH or PGP) by users over the telephone, the user-aided pairing of wireless (e.g. Bluetooth) devices, or the restore of secure associations in a disaster case, namely when one remote peer had his long-term keys corrupted.

Abstract. We present a general method to prove security properties of cryptographic protocols against active adversaries, when the messages exchanged by the honest parties are arbitrary expressions built using encryption and concatenation operations. The method allows to express security properties and carry out proofs using a simple logic based language, where messages are represented by syntactic expressions, and does not require dealing with probability distributions or asymptotic notation explicitly. Still, we show that the method is sound, meaning that logic statements can be naturally interpreted in the computational setting in such a way that if a statement holds true for any abstract (symbolic) execution of the protocol in the presence of a Dolev-Yao adversary, then its computational interpretation is also correct in the standard computational model where the adversary is an arbitrary probabilistic polynomial time program. This is the first paper providing a simple framework for translating security proofs from the logic setting to the standard computational setting for the case of powerful active adversaries that have total control of the communication network. 1

Abstract. There has been much interest in password-authenticated keyexchange protocols which remain secure even when users choose passwords from a very small space of possible passwords (say, a dictionary of English words). Under this assumption, one must be careful to design protocols which cannot be broken using off-line dictionary attacks in which an adversary enumerates all possible passwords in an attempt to determine the correct one. Many heuristic protocols have been proposed to solve this important problem. Only recently have formal validations of security (namely, proofs in the idealized random oracle and ideal cipher models) been given for specific constructions [3, 10, 22]. Very recently, a construction based on general assumptions, secure in the standard model with human-memorable passwords, has been proposed by Goldreich and Lindell [17]. Their protocol requires no public parameters; unfortunately, it requires techniques from general multi-party computation which make it impractical. Thus, [17] only proves that solutions are possible “in principal”. The main question left open by their work was finding an efficient solution to this fundamental problem. We show an efficient, 3-round, password-authenticated key exchange protocol with human-memorable passwords which is provably secure under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption, yet requires only (roughly) 8 times more computation than “standard ” Diffie-Hellman key exchange [14] (which provides no authentication at all). We assume public parameters available to all parties. We stress that we work in the standard model only, and do not require a “random oracle ” assumption.

We present session-key generation protocols in a model where the legitimate parties share only a human-memorizable password. The security guarantee holds with respect to probabilistic polynomial-time adversaries that control the communication channel (between the parties), and may omit, insert and modify messages at their choice. Loosely speaking, the effect of such an adversary that attacks an execution of our protocol is comparable to an attack in which an adversary is only allowed to make a constant number of queries of the form “is w the password of Party A”. We stress that the result holds also in case the passwords are selected at random from a small dictionary so that it is feasible (for the adversary) to scan the entire directory. We note that prior to our result, it was not clear whether or not such protocols were attainable without the use of random oracles or additional setup assumptions.

In this paper we present a general framework for password-based authenticated key exchange protocols, in the common reference string model. Our protocol is actually an abstraction of the key exchange protocol of Katz et al. and is based on the recently introduced notion of smooth projective hashing by Cramer and Shoup. We gain a number of benefits from this abstraction. First, we obtain a modular protocol that can be described using just three highlevel cryptographic tools. This allows a simple and intuitive understanding of its security.

In this paper we study security definitions for authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols.

Abstract. The Guillou-Quisquater (GQ) and Schnorr identification schemes are amongst the most efficient and best-known Fiat-Shamir follow-ons, but the question of whether they can be proven secure against impersonation under active attack has remained open. This paper provides such a proof for GQ based on the assumed security of RSA under one more inversion, an extension of the usual one-wayness assumption that was introduced in [5]. It also provides such a proof for the Schnorr scheme based on a corresponding discrete-log related assumption. These are the first security proofs for these schemes under assumptions related to the underlying one-way functions. Both results extend to establish security against impersonation under concurrent attack. 1

We show two efficient techniques enabling the use of biometric data to achieve mutual authentication or authenticated key exchange over a completely insecure (i.e., adversarially controlled) channel. In addition to achieving stronger security guarantees than the work of Boyen, we improve upon his solution in a number of other respects: we tolerate a broader class of errors and, in one case, improve upon the parameters of his solution and give a proof of security in the standard model. 1 Using Biometric Data for Secure Authentication Biometric data, as a potential source of high-entropy, secret information, havebeen suggested as a way to enable strong, cryptographically-secure authentication of human users without requiring them to remember or store traditionalcryptographic keys. Before such data can be used in existing cryptographic protocols, however, two issues must be addressed: first, biometric data are not uni-formly distributed and hence do not offer provable security guarantees if used