Deniable group key agreement

  • Authors:
  • Jens-Matthias Bohli;Rainer Steinwandt

  • Affiliations:
  • Institut für Algorithmen und Kognitive Systeme, Fakultät für Informatik, Karlsruhe, Germany;Department of Mathematical Sciences, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL

  • Venue:
  • VIETCRYPT'06 Proceedings of the First international conference on Cryptology in Vietnam
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Especially for key establishment protocols to be used in internet applications, the (privacy) concern of deniability arises: Can a protocol transcript be used—possibly by a participant—to prove the involvement of another party in the protocol? For two party key establishment protocols, a common technique for achieving deniability is the replacement of signature-based message authentication with authentication based on symmetric keys. We explore the question of deniability in the context of group key establishment : Taking into account malicious insiders, using a common symmetric key for authentication is critical, and the question of how to achieve deniability arises. Building on a model of Bresson et al., we offer a formalization of deniability and present a group key agreement offering provable security in the usual sense, deniability, and security guarantees against malicious insiders. Our approach for achieving deniability through a suitably distributed Schnorr-signature might also be of independent interest.