Flexible Authenticated and Confidential Channel Establishment (fACCE): Analyzing the Noise Protocol Framework
Dowling B, Rösler P, Schwenk J (2020)
Publication Type: Conference contribution
Publication year: 2020
Journal
Publisher: Springer
Book Volume: 12110 LNCS
Pages Range: 341-373
Conference Proceedings Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Event location: Edinburgh
ISBN: 9783030453732
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-45374-9_12
Abstract
The Noise protocol framework is a suite of channel establishment protocols, of which each individual protocol ensures various security properties of the transmitted messages, but keeps specification, implementation, and configuration relatively simple. Implementations of the Noise protocols are themselves, due to the employed primitives, very performant. Thus, despite its relative youth, Noise is already used by large-scale deployed applications such as WhatsApp and Slack. Though the Noise specification describes and claims the security properties of the protocol patterns very precisely, there has been no computational proof yet. We close this gap. Noise uses only a limited number of cryptographic primitives which makes it an ideal candidate for reduction-based security proofs. Due to its patterns’ characteristics as channel establishment protocols, and the usage of established keys within the handshake, the authenticated and confidential channel establishment (ACCE) model (Jager et al. CRYPTO 2012) seems to perfectly fit for an analysis of Noise. However, the ACCE model strictly divides protocols into two non-overlapping phases: the pre-accept phase (i.e., the channel establishment) and post-accept phase (i.e., the channel). In contrast, Noise allows the transmission of encrypted messages as soon as any key is established (for instance, before authentication between parties has taken place), and then incrementally increases the channel’s security guarantees. By proposing a generalization of the original ACCE model, we capture security properties of such staged channel establishment protocols flexibly – comparably to the multi-stage key exchange model (Fischlin and Günther CCS 2014). We give security proofs for eight of the 15 basic Noise patterns in the full version (EPRINT 2019/436) and exemplify them by the proof of the XK pattern in this article.
Authors with CRIS profile
Involved external institutions
Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB)
Germany (DE)
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ) / Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
Switzerland (CH)
Germany (DE)
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ) / Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
Switzerland (CH)
How to cite
APA:
Dowling, B., Rösler, P., & Schwenk, J. (2020). Flexible Authenticated and Confidential Channel Establishment (fACCE): Analyzing the Noise Protocol Framework. In Aggelos Kiayias, Markulf Kohlweiss, Petros Wallden, Vassilis Zikas (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (pp. 341-373). Edinburgh, GB: Springer.
MLA:
Dowling, Benjamin, Paul Rösler, and Jörg Schwenk. "Flexible Authenticated and Confidential Channel Establishment (fACCE): Analyzing the Noise Protocol Framework." Proceedings of the 23rd IACR International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography, PKC 2020, Edinburgh Ed. Aggelos Kiayias, Markulf Kohlweiss, Petros Wallden, Vassilis Zikas, Springer, 2020. 341-373.
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