Double Difficulties, Defense in depth A succinct authenticated key agreement protocol

Abstract In 2016, NIST announced an open competition with the goal of finding and standardizing a suitable quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithm, with the standard to be drafted in 2023. These algorithms aim to implement post-quantum secure key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) and digital signatures. However, the proposed algorithm does not consider authentication and is vulnerable to attacks such as man-in-the-middle. In this paper, we propose an authenticated key exchange algorithm to solve the above problems and improve its usability. The proposed algorithm combines learning with errors (LWE) and elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem to provide the required security goals. As forward security is a desirable property in a key exchange protocol, an ephemeral key pair is designed that a long-term secret compromise does not affect the security of past session keys. Moreover, the exchange steps required by the algorithm are very streamlined and can be completed with only two handshakes. We also use the random oracle model to prove the correctness and the security of proposed scheme. The performance analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. We believe that the novel approach introduced in this algorithm opens several doors for innovative applications of digital signatures in KEMs.