Efficient Secret Handshaking Protocol
Main Article Content
Abstract
Secret handshaking protocols allow two members of the same group to identify each other secretly, i.e., any two parties who are members
of the same group will recognize each other as members, yet, a party which is not a member of this group cannot tell, by engaging some party in the
handshaking protocol, whether that party is a member of this group. Unlinkability is one of the main merits of secret handshaking protocols, that is, a
party engaged in at least two handshakes must not be able to link any two different handshakes to a particular party. To achieve unlinkability, almost
all protocols proposed so far rely on the one-time credentials technique, where each party can use her credential only once. Hence, each party must
hold enough credentials allowing her to engage in the handshakes for enough period of time (e.g. a month) without referring to the group authority
for renewal. There is a severe security problem when one-time credentials are employed, that is, an active adversary may initialize with an honest
party as many handshaking sessions as she can and hence, depletes all the credentials held by this party, once a party runs out of credentials she will
not be able to engage in handshaking no more (Denial of Service attack, DoS). At the same time, the group authority must be able to manage
enormous number of issued credentials in data structures and certificate revocation lists (CRL). Thus, on the large scale implementation (large group
population), one-time credentials become impractical. In this paper, we propose a provably secure two-party secret handshaking protocol which
realizes the unlinkability property using only one permanent credential for each member and avoiding the inefficient one-time credentials. At the
same time, our protocol provides immediate revocation of members by the group authority without relying heavily on CRL structures.
Â
Keywords: Secret handshakes, authentication, one-time credentials, unlinkability, revocation, denial of service, anonymous RSA, mediated PKI.
Downloads
Article Details
COPYRIGHT
Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; that if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors agree to automatic transfer of the copyright to the publisher.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work
- The journal allows the author(s) to retain publishing rights without restrictions.
- The journal allows the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions.