Today, we release a new paper entitled “The Fairy-Ring Dance: Password Authenticated Key Exchange in a Group“. This is joint work with Xun Yi (RMIT University), Liqun Chen (HP Labs) and Siamak Shahandashti (Newcastle University). The initial work started when Xun visited us at the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University in Feb, 2014. This is one of the collaborative research outcomes, which stem from that visit.
The subject of two-party Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) has been well studied for nearly three decades, however the topic of multi-party Group PAKE (GPAKE) has so far received little attention. Partly, this is because a Group PAKE is significantly more complex to design than a two-party PAKE due to more interactions between participants, hence exposing more potential attack vectors for an adversary to exploit.
We decided to investigate this subject as we believed Group PAKE protocols would become increasingly more important in the next 10 years – especially in the era of Internet of Things (IoT). Using a Group PAKE protocol can help set up a group of out-of-box IoT devices that have no pre-installed secrets or certificates; one just needs to enter a common (low-entropy) passcode into each of the devices. The protocol can then take over to ensure secure group communication among these IoT devices despite that all data is transmitted through an insecure Internet.
One major technical challenge here is to make the protocol as round efficient as possible. With Moore’s law, the computational efficiency can rapidly improve over time, but the round efficiency will stay more or less the same. Intuitively, when a group of entities engage in multiple rounds of interactions over a distributed network, the bottleneck of the overall latency will likely be determined by the slowest responder in each round. Hence, our strategy is to trade off computation for optimal round efficiency, with the aim to minimize the number of rounds as much as possible.
The paper (a free copy available at IACR ePrint) gives more technical details about how the above strategy is realized. I’ll present the paper at the ASIACCS Workshop on IoT Privacy, Trust, and Security (IoTPTS), in April 2015. It will be interesting to hear feedback from academic and industrial researchers working on IoT.
Before reading the paper, I would suggest the reader to watch the following “Fairy Ring Dance” from YouTube first, since the structural design of our solution shares some similarity to that dance.