RSA-based secret handshakes

Abstract

A secret handshake mechanism allows two entities, members of a same group, to authenticate each other secretly. This primitive was introduced recently by Balfanz, Durfee, Shankar, Smetters, Staddon and Wong and, so far, all the schemes proposed are based on discrete log systems. This paper proposes three new secret handshake protocols secure against active impersonator and detector adversaries. Inspired by two RSA-based key agreement protocols introduced by Okamoto and Tanaka in 1989 and Girault in 1991, our schemes are, in the random oracle model, provably secure against active adversaries under the assumption that the RSA problem is intractable. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.