| Hamburg University of Science and Technology, Distributed Systems |
| Schwarzenbergstraße 95, 21073 Hamburg - Germany |
Interaction of Tree Parity Machines (TPMs) has been discussed as an alternative secure key exchange concept and attacks have been Authentication is at least as important as a secure exchange of keys. Adding an authentication e.g. via hashing is straightforward but outside the concept named Neural Cryptography. The here presented is a consequent formulation of an implicit Zero-Knowledge authentication from within the key exchange concept and another alternative, integrating an explicit Zero-Knowledge authentication into the already interactive protocol. A Man-In-The-Middle attack and even all currently known attacks can so be averted. This in turn allows to securely exploit the trajectory in key space along with rapid key exchange and an efficient increase of key length.
Another benefit of the here presented authentication method is that all currently known findings concerning Neural Cryptography are untouched and still valid - even with the extension of authentication. Further on there is no need to reimplement the interface, it only gets extended by an authentication control unit.
The general trade-off in applied cryptography between available resources and the required level of security also applies using the TPM principle. In many practical embedded security solutions it is often admissive to provide a system safe enough for the particular application, and given certain attack scenarios. The TPM principle extended with the proposed authentication is very attractive for such embedded applications due to its hardware-friendly basic operations, particularly not operating on large numbers.