## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2005/163

Modeling Insider Attacks on Group Key-Exchange Protocols

Jonathan Katz and Ji Sun Shin

Abstract: Protocols for authenticated key exchange (AKE) allow parties within an insecure network to establish a common session key which can then be used to secure their future communication. It is fair to say that group AKE is currently less well understood than the case of two-party AKE; in particular, attacks by malicious insiders --- a concern specific to the group setting --- have so far been considered only in a relatively ad-hoc'' fashion. The main contribution of this work is to address this deficiency by providing a formal, comprehensive model and definition of security for group AKE which automatically encompasses insider attacks. We do so by defining an appropriate ideal functionality for group AKE within the universal composability (UC) framework. As a side benefit, any protocol secure with respect to our definition is secure even when run concurrently with other protocols, and the key generated by any such protocol may be used securely in any subsequent application.

In addition to proposing this definition, we show that the resulting notion of security is strictly stronger than the one proposed by Bresson, et al. (termed AKE-security''), and that our definition implies all previously-suggested notions of security against insider attacks. We also show a simple technique for converting any AKE-secure protocol into one secure with respect to our definition.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / key exchange

Publication Info: An extended abstract will appear at ACM CCCS '05

Date: received 6 Jun 2005, last revised 17 Jun 2008

Contact author: jkatz at cs umd edu

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Typos in the definitions corrected.

Short URL: ia.cr/2005/163

[ Cryptology ePrint archive ]