Member Tampering Attack on Burmester-Desmedt Group Key Exchange Protocol and Its Countermeasure

Da-Zhi Sun () and Yangguang Tian
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Da-Zhi Sun: Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Networking (TANK), College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China
Yangguang Tian: Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, Surrey, UK

Mathematics, 2022, vol. 10, issue 19, 1-18

Abstract: With the rapid development of cloud computing and mobile networks, more and more application scenarios require a secret group key for secure communication. Group Key Exchange (GKE) protocol provides a secret group key for three or more members. Burmester and Desmedt presented an influential GKE protocol, which has a broadcast version and a cyclic version. In this paper, we investigate the security weaknesses of the Burmester-Desmedt protocol. We report that both the broadcast version and the cyclic version of the Burmester-Desmedt protocol suffer member tampering attacks if the two members that belong to both group A and group B are corrupted. That is, two corrupted members can add some unknowing members of group A to group B and trick the legal members of group B to believe that these unknowing members share the secret group key with them after a protocol run. Furthermore, to defeat the member tampering attack, we propose digital signature-based improvements on the broadcast version and the cyclic version of the Burmester-Desmedt protocol. We hope our research results will encourage the development of more robust and effective GKE protocols that stand rigorous security analysis.

Keywords: group key exchange; member tampering attack; scalability; security protocol; security analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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