Authenticated Diffie–Hellman key agreement protocol using a single cryptographic assumption

In modern communication systems, a popular way of providing authentication in an authenticated Diffie–Hellman key agreement protocol is to sign the result of a one-way hash function (such as MD5) of a Diffie–Hellman public key. The security of such a protocol is based on the weakest of all the cryptographic assumptions of the algorithms involved: Diffie–Hellman key distribution, digital signature and a one-way hash function. If a protocol can be constructed using one cryptographic assumption, it would be at least as secure as that with multiple assumptions. The authors propose three authenticated Diffie–Hellman key-agreement protocols, each of which is based on one cryptographic assumption. In particular, the first protocol is based on a discrete logarithm, the second on an elliptic curve and the third on RSA factoring. The main objective of the paper is to show that the security of a protocol should be assessed at the protocol level as a whole, rather than at the level of individual algorithms that are used to build the protocol.