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An Efficient and Generic Construction for Signal's Handshake (X3DH): Post-Quantum, State Leakage Secure, and Deniable
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| Abstract: | The Signal protocol is a secure instant messaging protocol that underlies the security of numerous applications such as WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook Messenger among many others. The Signal protocol consists of two sub-protocols known as the X3DH protocol and the double ratchet protocol, where the latter has recently gained much attention. For instance, Alwen, Coretti, and Dodis (Eurocrypt'19) provided a concrete security model along with a generic construction based on simple building blocks that are instantiable from versatile assumptions, including post-quantum ones. In contrast, as far as we are aware, works focusing on the X3DH protocol seem limited. In this work, we cast the X3DH protocol as a specific type of authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol, which we call a Signal-conforming AKE protocol, and formally define its security model based on the vast prior work on AKE protocols. We then provide the first efficient generic construction of a Signal-conforming AKE protocol based on standard cryptographic primitives such as key encapsulation mechanisms (KEM) and signature schemes. Specifically, this results in the first post-quantum secure replacement of the X3DH protocol on well-established assumptions. Similar to the X3DH protocol, our Signal-conforming AKE protocol offers a strong (or stronger) flavor of security, where the exchanged key remains secure even when all the non-trivial combinations of the long-term secrets and session-specific secrets are compromised. Moreover, our protocol has a weak flavor of deniability and we further show how to strengthen it using ring signatures. Finally, we provide a full-fledged, generic C implementation of our (weakly deniable) protocol. We instantiate it with several Round 3 candidates (finalists and alternates) to the NIST post-quantum standardization process and compare the resulting bandwidth and computation performances. Our implementation is publicly available. |
Video from PKC 2021
BibTeX
@article{pkc-2021-30979,
title={An Efficient and Generic Construction for Signal's Handshake (X3DH): Post-Quantum, State Leakage Secure, and Deniable},
booktitle={Public-Key Cryptography - PKC 2021},
publisher={Springer},
doi={10.1007/978-3-030-75248-4_15},
author={Keitaro Hashimoto and Shuichi Katsumata and Kris Kwiatkowski and Thomas Prest},
year=2021
}