Provably secure key establishment protocol using one-way functions

Abstract The design of a secure and efficient key establishment protocol is one of the toughest challenge in communication protocol design. In the literature many key establishment protocols claimed to be secure against some attacks were later shown to be weak against new attacks. In this work, we have identified a class of weakness named as insider-replay in some existing protocols and proposed a design principle to avoid the weakness. Based on the design principle, we have proposed an efficient key establishment protocol. The proposed protocol is shown to be provably secure under formal security model and averts insider-replay. We have also analyzed the efficiency of the proposed protocol in comparison with existing protocols.