A Reflection on the Security of Two-Party Key Establishment Protocols

Two-party key establishment has been a very fruitful research area in cryptography, with many security models and numerous protocols proposed. In this paper, we take another look at the YAK protocol and the HMQV protocols and present some extended analysis. Motivated by our analysis, we reflect on the security properties that are desired by two-party key establishment protocols, and their formalizations. In particular, we take into account the interface between a key establishment protocol and the applications which may invoke it, and emphasize the concept of session and the usage of session identifier. Moreover, we show how to design a two-party key establishment protocol to achieve both key authentication and entity authentication properties in our security model.