Towards a Provably Secure DoS-Resilient Key Exchange Protocol with Perfect Forward Secrecy

Just Fast Keying (JFK) is a simple, efficient and secure key exchange protocol proposed by Aiello et al. (ACM TISSEC, 2004). JFK is well known for its novel design features, notably its resistance to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Using Meadows’ cost-based framework, we identify a new DoS vulnerability in JFK. The JFK protocol is claimed secure in the Canetti-Krawczyk model under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption. We show that security of the JFK protocol, when reusing ephemeral Diffie-Hellman keys, appears to require the Gap Diffie-Hellman (GDH) assumption in the random oracle model. We propose a new variant of JFK that avoids the identified DoS vulnerability and provides perfect forward secrecy even under the DDH assumption, achieving the full security promised by the JFK protocol.

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