Entity Authentication and Authenticated Key Exchange with Tree Parity Machines

This paper provides the first analytical and practical treatment of entity authentication and authenticated key exchange in the framework of Tree Parity Machines (TPMs). The interaction of TPMs has been discussed as an alternative concept for secure symmetric key exchange. Several attacks have been proposed on the non-authenticated principle. Adding and some extra entity authentication method is straightforward but outside the concept using TPMs. A simple and consequent implicit entity authentication from within the key exchange concept as an extension to the key exchange protocol is suggested. A proof for the soundness of the proposed entity authentication is given. Furthermore, next to averting a Man-In-The-Middle attack, the currently known attacks on the non-authenticated symmetric key exchange principle using TPMs can provably be averted for the authenticated variant.