Efficient group authentication protocols based on human interaction

Long Hoang Nguyen; A.  W.  Roscoe

Paper 2009/150

Efficient group authentication protocols based on human interaction

Long Hoang Nguyen and A. W. Roscoe

Abstract

We re-examine the needs of computer security in pervasive computing from first principles, specifically the problem of bootstrapping secure networks. We consider the case of systems that may have no shared secret information, and where there is no structure such as a PKI available. We propose several protocols which achieve a high degree of security based on a combination of human-mediated communication and an ordinary Dolev-Yao communication medium. In particular they resist combinatorial attacks on the hash or digest values that have to be compared by human users, seemingly optimising the amount of security they can achieve for a given amount of human effort. We compare our protocols with recent pairwise protocols proposed by, for example, Hoepman and Vaudenay.

Note: A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the informal proceedingds of the workshop on Foundation of Computer Security and Automated Reasoning Protocol Security Analysis, pp. 9-31 (FCS-ARSPA 2006).

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. This paper has been accepted and published in the informal proceedings (page 9–31) of Workshop on Foundation of Computer Security and Automated Reasoning Protocol Security Analysis, August 2006
Contact author(s): long nguyen @ comlab ox ac uk
History: 2011-12-11: revised; 2009-04-01: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2009/150
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2009/150,
      author = {Long Hoang Nguyen and A.  W.  Roscoe},
      title = {Efficient group authentication protocols based on human interaction},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2009/150},
      year = {2009},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/150}
}