Title: On security proof of McCullagh–Barreto's key agreement protocol and its variants

Authors: Zhaohui Cheng, Liqun Chen

Addresses: School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, London, UK. ' Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Filton Road, Stoke Gifford, Bristol, UK

Abstract: McCullagh and Barreto presented an identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol in CT-RSA 2005. Their protocol was found to be vulnerable to a key-compromise impersonation attack. In order to recover the weakness, McCullagh and Barreto and Xie proposed two variants of the protocol respectively. In each of these works, a security proof of the proposed protocol was presented. In this paper, we revisit these three security proofs and show that all the reductions in these proofs are invalid, because the property of indistinguishability between their simulation and the real world was not held. As a replacement, we slightly modify the McCullagh and Barreto|s second protocol and then formally analyse the security of the modified scheme in the Bellare–Rogaway key agreement model.

Keywords: identity-based authentication; key agreement protocols; pairings; security proofs; key-compromise impersonation attacks; cryptography; networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2007.013178

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2007 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.251 - 259

Published online: 11 Apr 2007 *

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