Secret Handshakes from Pairing-Based Key Agreements

Consider a CIA agent who wants to authenticate herself to a server, but does not want to reveal her CIA credentials unless the server is a genuine CIA outlet. Consider also that the CIA server does not want to reveal its CIA credentials to anyone but CIA agents – not even to other CIA servers. In this paper we first show how pairing-based cryptography can be used to implement such secret handshakes. We then propose a formal definition for secure secret handshakes, and prove that our pairing-based schemes are secure under the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our protocols support role-based group membership authentication, traceability, indistinguishability to eavesdroppers, unbounded collusion resistance, and forward repudiability. Our secret-handshake scheme can be implemented as a TLS cipher suite. We report on the performance of our preliminary Java implementation.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SP
• Authors: Dirk Balfanz, Glenn Durfee, Narendar Shankar, Diana K. Smetters, Jessica Staddon, Hao-Chi Wong
• Keywords: Cia Agents, CIA Credentials, Cia Servers, Security Privacy, SP 2003