GAnGS: gather, authenticate 'n group securely

Establishing secure communication among a group of physically collocated people is a challenge. This problem can be reduced to establishing authentic public keys among all the participants - these public keys then serve to establish a shared secret symmetric key for encryption and authentication of messages. Unfortunately, in most real-world settings, public key infrastructures (PKI) are uncommon and distributing a secret in a public space is difficult. Thus, it is a challenge to exchange authentic public keys in a scalable, secure, and easy to use fashion. In this paper, we propose GAnGS, a protocol for the secure exchange of authenticated information among a group of people. In contrast to prior work, GAnGS resists Group-in-the-Middle and Sybil attacks by malicious insiders, as well as infiltration attacks by malicious bystanders. GAnGS is designed to be robust to user errors, such as miscounting the number of participants or incorrectly comparing checksums. We have implemented and evaluated GAnGS on Nokia N70 phones. The GAnGS system is viable and achieves a good balance between scalability, security, and ease of use.

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