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Abstract
The need for communications-based security can be traced back thousands of years to the days of ancient Egypt As time went on, society became more complex and so did communications security. Although the technologies have changed, the underlying reasoning behind securing communications was that people need a secure method of transmitting messages. As recently, the general consensus was that all a user had to do to protect their network was install a firewall in front of their Internet connection and load anti-virus software on their network. Today, things are quite different. Hacking tools can be found on the Internet and used by novice hackers.
Hacking has become so popular that underground networks for passing information and techniques now exist. In today’s environment, a security professional must be extremely diligent in the protection of their assets. Almost everyone today has a mobile phone, many people have personal digital assistants PDAs, and a growing number of people are adding wireless network interface cards NICs to their laptops and desktops. Since these devices work over ”open air,” ways must be found to secure their transmissions. Now that users have these tools for connecting to networks, they need software applications to communicate with each other. Very often, the two users want the security between their devices to be peer-to-peer, thus operating independently from any authority. In practice, this means that the portable devices must run a protocol to authenticate each other and to protect the data they exchange (to ensure confidentiality and integrity); the latter operation typically requires an establishment of a common shared key, this key can be used to secure both immediate communications and communications taking place afterwards (e.g., when users exchange email over the Internet).
Authentication and key establishment are fundamental building blocks for securing electronic communication. Cryptographic algorithm for encryption and integrity cannot perform their function unless secure keys have been established and the users know which parties share such keys. It is essential that protocols for providing and key establishment are fit for their purpose.
In this thesis, we present an authenticated key agreement with key confirmation in the asymmetric setting which establishes a shared secret key between two entities. The new algorithm integrates the Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol. Our proposal is invented to provide an efficient security against active attacks added to the complete key authentication. Also we prove that the new algorithm has the desirable security attributes, which are discussed through this thesis. Hence we provide a comparison of our new protocol with others in terms of computational cost and security properties. The proposal has been described in the discrete logarithmic setting over a finite field.