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Diffie-Hellman without Difficulty

  • Conference paper

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 7140)

Abstract

An excellent way for a protocol to obtain shared keys is Diffie-Hellman. For the automated verification of security protocols, the use of Diffie-Hellman poses a certain amount of difficulty, because it requires algebraic reasoning. Several tools work in the free algebra and even for tools that do support Diffie-Hellman, the algebraic reasoning becomes a bottleneck.

We provide a new relative-soundness result: for a large class of protocols, significantly restricting the abilities of the intruder is without loss of attacks. We also show the soundness of a very restrictive encoding of Diffie-Hellman proposed by Millen and how to obtain a problem that can be answered in the free algebra without increasing its size upon encoding. This enables the efficient use of free-algebra verification tools for Diffie-Hellman based protocols and significantly reduces search-spaces for tools that do support algebraic reasoning.

Keywords

  • Security Protocol
  • Free Algebra
  • Reduction Rule
  • Modular Exponentiation
  • Simple Constraint

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Mödersheim, S. (2012). Diffie-Hellman without Difficulty. In: Barthe, G., Datta, A., Etalle, S. (eds) Formal Aspects of Security and Trust. FAST 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7140. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29420-4_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29420-4_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-29419-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-29420-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)