Universally Composable Authentication and Key-Exchange with Global PKI

Message authentication and key exchange are two of the most basic tasks of cryptography. Solutions based on public-key infrastructure (PKI) are prevalent. Still, the state of the art in composable security analysis of PKI-based authentication and key exchange is somewhat unsatisfactory. Specifically, existing treatments either (a) make the unrealistic assumption that the PKI is accessible only within the confines of the protocol itself, thus failing to capture real-world PKI-based authentication, or (b) impose oftenunnecessary requirements—such as strong on-line non-transferability—on candidate protocols, thus ruling out natural candidates. We give a modular and universally composable analytical framework for PKI-based message authentication and key exchange protocols. This framework guarantees security even when the PKI is pre-existing and globally available, without being unnecessarily restrictive. Specifically, we model PKI as a global set-up functionality within the Global UC security model [Canetti et al., TCC 2007] and relax the ideal authentication and key exchange functionalities accordingly. We then demonstrate the security of basic signature-based authentication and key exchange protocols. Our modeling makes minimal security assumptions on the PKI in use; in particular, “knowledge of the secret key” is not needed.