An authenticated key exchange protocol in elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

The standard Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol is the first and most famous protocol, but it has many flaws and drawbacks. Lack of authentication in this protocol makes man-in-the-middle attack possible. Adding separate authentication to the protocol solves the problem but adds extra transmission and computation costs. Protocols which combine the authentication with key exchange are more efficient. In this paper we propose a new two-pass key exchange protocol based on Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. This protocol works with the Elliptic curves over finite field F _p . We show that our protocol meets the security attributes under the assumption that the elliptic curve Discrete Logarithm and RSA problem is secure. Also we provide imbedded authentication, so our protocol does not suffer from the man-in-the-middle attack.

Keywords and phrases:

• Discrete logarithms
• elliptic curve
• key exchange
• finite field