Abstract
A key agreement (or distribution) protocol is a set of communication rules whereby two users can establish a shared common key. The shared key can be used by the users in future secure communications. We analyze a key agreement protocol presented by Leighton and Micali at the CRYPTO'93 conference, which is based on tamper-proof hardware, and show that the protocol fails in that a common key shared between two users can always be easily obtained by a number of legitimate users in a system where the proposed protocol is employed. An interesting point is that the legitimate users can derive the key without opening a single tamper-proof chip. We also propose a very simple identity based conference key agreement protocol that frees of the flaw possessed by Leighton and Micali's protocol. Furthermore, we employ ideas behind our protocol to successfully repair Leighton and Micali's failed protocol.
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References
T. Leighton and S. Micali. New approaches to secret-key exchange, 1993. Presented at Crypto'93.
T. Leighton and S. Micali. Secret-key agreement without public-key cryptography (extended abstract). In Advances in Cryptology — Proceedings of Crypto'93, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, 1994. (to appear).
T. Matsumoto and H. Imai. On the key predistribution systems: A practical solution to the key distribution problem. In Advances in Cryptology — Proceedings of Crypto'87, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 185–193. Springer-Verlag, 1988.
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Zheng, Y. (1995). How to break and repair Leighton and Micali's key agreement protocol. In: De Santis, A. (eds) Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT'94. EUROCRYPT 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 950. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053445
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053445
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