Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2009/003

Separating two roles of hashing in one-way message authentication

L. H. Nguyen and A. W. Roscoe

Abstract: We analyse two new and related families of one-way authentication protocols, where a party wants to authenticate its public information to another. In the first, the objective is to do without shared passwords or a PKI, making use of low-bandwidth empirical/authentic channels where messages cannot be faked or modified. The analysis of these leads to a new security principle, termed separation of security concerns, under which protocols should be designed to tackle one-shot attacks and combinatorial search separately. This also leads us develop a new class of protocols for the case such as PKI where a relatively expensive signature mechanism exists. We demonstrate as part of this work that a popular protocol in the area, termed MANA I, neither optimises human effort nor offers as much security as had previously been believed. We offer a number of improved versions for MANA I that provides more security for half the empirical work, using a more general empirical channel.

Category / Keywords: authentication

Publication Info: This paper was published in the Proceedings of FCS-ARSPA-WITS 2008

Date: received 29 Dec 2008, last revised 28 Nov 2009

Contact author: long nguyen at comlab ox ac uk

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: This is a long version of another paper, which has been published in Proceedings of FCS-ARSPA-WITS'08 workshop.

This includes detailed security proofs of several protocols introduced in the short version of the paper.

Version: 20091128:223831 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2009/003

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