Authentication for Paranoids: Multi-party Secret Handshakes

In a society increasingly concerned with the steady assault on electronic privacy, the need for privacy-preserving techniques is both natural and justified. This need extends to traditional security tools such as authentication and key distribution protocols. A secret handshake protocol allow members of the same group to authenticate each other secretly, meaning that a non-member cannot determine, even by engaging someone in a protocol, whether that party is a member of the group. Whereas, parties who are members of the same group recognize each other as members, and can establish authenticated secret keys with each other. Thus, a secret handshake protocol offers privacy-preserving authentication and can be used whenever group members need to identify and securely communicate with each other without being observed or detected. Most prior work in secret handshake protocols considered 2-party scenarios. In this paper we propose formal definitions of multi-party secret handshakes, and ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACNS
• Authors: Stanislaw Jarecki, Jihye Kim, Gene Tsudik
• Keywords: ACNS 2006, Cryptography, Handshake Protocol Offers, Multi-party Secret Handshake, Secret Handshake Protocol