Olivier Chevassut

Dynamic Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange under Standard Assumptions

Authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange allows two principals communicating over a public network, and each holding public/ private keys, to agree on a shared secret value. In this paper we study the natural extension of this cryptographic problem to a group of principals. We begin from existing formal security models and refine them to incorporate major missing details (e.g., strong-corruption and concurrent sessions). With in this model we define the execution of a protocol for authenticated dynamic group Diffie-Hellman and show that it is provably secure under the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our security result holds in the standard model and thus provides better security guarantees than previously published results in the random oracle model.

New Security Results on Encrypted Key Exchange

Schemes for encrypted key exchange are designed to provide two entities communicating over a public network, and sharing a (short) password only, with a session key to be used to achieve data integrity and/or message confidentiality. An example of a very efficient and “elegant” scheme for encrypted key exchange considered for standardization by the IEEE P1363 Standard working group is AuthA. This scheme was conjectured secure when the symmetric-encryption primitive is instantiated via either a cipher that closely behaves like an “ideal cipher”, or a mask generation function that is the product of the message with a hash of the password. While the security of this scheme in the former case has been recently proven, the latter case was still an open problem. For the first time we prove in this paper that this scheme is secure under the assumptions that the hash function closely behaves like a random oracle and that the computational Diffie-Hellman problem is difficult. Furthermore, since Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks have become a common threat we enhance AuthA with a mechanism to protect against them.

Security proofs for an efficient password-based key exchange

Password-based key exchange schemes are designed to provide entities communicating over a public network, and sharing a (short) password only, with a session key (e.g, the key is used for data integrity and/or confidentiality). The focus of the present paper is on the analysis of very efficient schemes that have been proposed to the IEEE P1363 Standard working group on password-based authenticated key-exchange methods, but which actual security was an open problem. We analyze the AuthA key exchange scheme and give a complete proof of its security. Our analysis shows that the AuthA protocol and its multiple modes of operations are provably secure under the computational Diffie-Hellman intractability assumption, in both the random-oracle and the ideal-ciphers models.

Mutual authentication and group key agreement for low-power mobile devices

Wireless networking has the power to fit the Internet with wings, however, it will not take off until the security technological hurdles have been overcome. In this paper we propose a very efficient and provably secure group key agreement well suited for unbalanced networks consisting of devices with strict power consumption restrictions and wireless gateways with less stringent restrictions. Our method meets practicability, simplicity, and strong notions of security.

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

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.

One-Time verifier-based encrypted key exchange

“Grid” technology enables complex interactions among computational and data resources; however, to be deployed in production computing environments “Grid” needs to implement additional security mechanisms. Recent compromises of user and server machines at Grid sites have resulted in a need for secure password-authentication key-exchange technologies. AuthA is an example of such a technology considered for standardization by the IEEE P1363.2 working group. Unfortunately in its current form AuthA does not achieve the notion of forward-secrecy in a provably-secure way nor does it allow a Grid user to log into his account using an un-trusted computer. This paper addresses this void by first proving that AuthA indeed achieves this goal, and then by modifying it in such a way that it is secure against attacks using captured user passwords or server data.

An integrated solution for secure group communication in wide-area networks

Many distributed applications require a secure reliable group communication system to provide coordination among the application components. This paper describes a secure group layer (SGL) which bundles a reliable group communication system, a group authorization and access control mechanism, and a group key agreement protocol to provide a comprehensive and practical secure group communication platform. The SGL also encapsulates the standard message security services (i.e., confidentiality, authenticity and integrity). A number of challenging issues encountered in the design of SGL are brought to light and experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation are discussed.

Provably secure authenticated group Diffie-Hellman key exchange

Authenticated key-exchange protocols allow two participants A and B, communicating over a public network and each holding an authentication means to exchange a shared secret value. Methods designed to deal with this cryptographic problem ensure A (resp. B) that no other participants aside from B (resp. A) can learn any information about the agreed value and often also ensure A and B that their respective partner has actually computed this value. A natural extension to this cryptographic method is to consider a pool of participants exchanging a shared secret value and to provide a formal treatment for it. Starting from the famous two-party Diffie--Hellman (DH) key-exchange protocol and from its authenticated variants, security experts have extended it to the multiparty setting for over a decade and, in the past few years, completed a formal analysis in the framework of modern cryptography. The present paper synthesizes this body of work on the provably-secure authenticated group DH key exchange.

Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Secure against Dictionary Attacks

Group Diffie-Hellman schemes for password-based key exchange are designed to provide a pool of players communicating over a public network, and sharing just a human-memorable password, with a session key (e.g, the key is used for multicast data integrity and confidentiality). The fundamental security goal to achieve in this scenario is security against dictionary attacks. While solutions have been proposed to solve this problem no formal treatment has ever been suggested. In this paper, we define a security model and then present a protocol with its security proof in both the random oracle model and the ideal-cipher model.

Provably secure password-based authentication in TLS

In this paper, we show how to design an efficient, provably secure password-based authenticated key exchange mechanism specifically for the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol. The goal is to provide a technique that allows users to employ (short) passwords to securely identify themselves to servers. As our main contribution, we describe a new password-based technique for user authentication in TLS, called Simple Open Key Exchange (SOKE). Loosely speaking, the SOKE ciphersuites are unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman ciphersuites in which the clients Diffie-Hellman ephemeral public value is encrypted using a simple mask generation function. The mask is simply a constant value raised to the power of (a hash of) the password.The SOKE ciphersuites, in advantage over previous password-based authentication ciphersuites for TLS, combine the following features. First, SOKE has formal security arguments; the proof of security based on the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption is in the random oracle model, and holds for concurrent executions and for arbitrarily large password dictionaries. Second, SOKE is computationally efficient; in particular, it only needs operations in a sufficiently large prime-order subgroup for its Diffie-Hellman computations (no safe primes). Third, SOKE provides good protocol flexibility because the user identity and password are only required once a SOKE ciphersuite has actually been negotiated, and after the server has sent a server identity.