Efficient group authentication protocol based on human interaction
Long Nguyen · 2006
Abstract. We re-examine the needs of computer security in pervasive computing from first principles, specifically the problem of bootstrap-ping secure networks. We consider the case of systems that may have no shared secret information, and where there is no structure such as a PKI available. We propose several protocols which achieve a high degree of security based on a combination of human-mediated communication and an ordinary Dolev-Yao communication medium. In particular they resist combinatorial attacks on the hash or digest values that have to be compared by human users, seemingly optimising the amount of secu-rity they can achieve for a given amount of human effort. We compare our protocols with recent pairwise protocols proposed by, for example, Hoepman and Vaudenay. 1