1st International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communication Networks

Research Article

Short Paper: Practically Unbounded One-Way Chains for Authentication with Backward Secrecy

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/SECURECOMM.2005.46,
        author={ R.  Di Pietro and A.  Durante and L. Mancini and V.   Patil},
        title={Short Paper: Practically Unbounded One-Way Chains for Authentication with Backward Secrecy},
        proceedings={1st International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communication Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={SECURECOMM},
        year={2006},
        month={3},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/SECURECOMM.2005.46}
    }
    
  • R. Di Pietro
    A. Durante
    L. Mancini
    V. Patil
    Year: 2006
    Short Paper: Practically Unbounded One-Way Chains for Authentication with Backward Secrecy
    SECURECOMM
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/SECURECOMM.2005.46
R. Di Pietro1, A. Durante1, L. Mancini1, V. Patil1
  • 1: Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy

Abstract

One-way hash chains have been the preferred choice (over symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography) in security setups where efficiency mattered; despite the ephemeral confidentiality and authentication they assure. They only support forward secrecy and have limitations over the chain size (bounded). In this paper, we show how the use of chameleon functions leads to the generation of practically unbounded one-way chains with constant memory storage requirement, providing forward, and backward secrecy as well. Such a cryptographic tool appears to be a great enabler for a variety of applications that could not be efficiently realized earlier. From our experiments we observed that this new kind of one-way chain formation adds a slight computational burden, which is justifiable by the unique advantages provided under our construction. The basic unit of our construction, chameleon function, can be elegantly used to design trees or even simpler star-like constructs