The Station-to-Station (STS) protocol is a cryptographic key agreement scheme based on classic Diffie-Hellman that provides mutual key and entity authentication.

In addition to protecting the established key from an attacker, the STS protocol uses no timestamps and provides perfect forward secrecy

Perfect forward secrecy

In an authenticated key-agreement protocol that uses public key cryptography, perfect forward secrecy is the property that ensures that a session key derived from a set of long-term public and private keys will not be compromised if one of the private keys is compromised in the future.Forward...

. It also entails two-way explicit key confirmation, making it an authenticated key agreement with key confirmation (AKC) protocol.

STS was originally presented in 1987 in the context of ISDN security , finalized in 1989 and generally presented by Whitfield Diffie

Whitfield Diffie

Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography.Diffie and Martin Hellman's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976...

, Paul C. van Oorschot

Paul van Oorschot

Paul C. van Oorschot is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in network and software security. He is best known as co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography , together...

 and Michael J. Wiener in 1992. The historical context for the protocol is also discussed in .

Description

Deployment of STS can take different forms depending on communication requirements and the level of prior communication between parties. The data described in STS Setup may be shared prior to the beginning of a session to lessen the impact of the session's establishment.

In the following explanations, exponential (Diffie-Hellman) operations provide the basis for key agreement, though this is not a requirement. The protocol may be modified, for example, to use elliptic curve

Elliptic curve

In mathematics, an elliptic curve is a smooth, projective algebraic curve of genus one, on which there is a specified point O. An elliptic curve is in fact an abelian variety — that is, it has a multiplication defined algebraically with respect to which it is a group — and O serves as the identity...

s instead.

STS Setup

The following data must be generated before initiating the protocol.

An asymmetric signature keypair for each party : Required for authentication. The public portion of this keypair may be shared prior to session establishment.

Key establishment parameters : The specification of a cyclic group p and a generator g for that group. These parameters may be public. note that for additional security each party may supply its own parameters.

Sharing this data prior to the beginning of the session lessens the complexity of the protocol.

Basic STS

Supposing all setup data has been shared, the STS protocol proceeds as follows. If a step cannot be completed, the protocol immediately stops. Please note that all exponentials are in the group specified by p.

1. Alice generates a random number x and computes and sends the exponential g^x to Bob.
2. Bob generates a random number y and computes the exponential g^y.
3. Bob computes the shared secret key K = (g^x)^y.
4. Bob concatenates the exponentials (g^y, g^x) (order is important), signs them using his asymmetric key B, and then encrypts them with K. He sends the ciphertext along with his own exponential g^y to Alice.
5. Alice computes the shared secret key K = (g^y)^x.
6. Alice decrypts and verifies Bob's signature.
7. Alice concatenates the exponentials (g^x, g^y) (order is important), signs them using her asymmetric key A, and then encrypts them with K. She sends the ciphertext to Bob.
8. Bob decrypts and verifies Alice's signature.

Alice and Bob are now mutually authenticated and have a shared secret. This secret, K, can then be used to encrypt further communication. The basic form of the protocol is formalized in the following three steps:

(1) Alice → Bob : g^x
(2) Alice ← Bob : g^y, E_K(S_B(g^y, g^x))
(3) Alice → Bob : E_K(S_A(g^x, g^y))

Full STS

Setup data can also be incorporated into the protocol itself. Public key certificate

Public key certificate

In cryptography, a public key certificate is an electronic document which uses a digital signature to bind a public key with an identity — information such as the name of a person or an organization, their address, and so forth...

s may be sent in steps 2 and 3 if the keys are not known in advance.

(1) Alice → Bob : g^x
(2) Alice ← Bob : g^y, Cert_B, E_K(S_B(g^y, g^x))
(3) Alice → Bob : Cert_A, E_K(S_A(g^x, g^y))

If system-wide key establishment parameters are not used, the initiator and responder may create and send their own parameters. In this case, parameters should be sent with the exponential.

(1) Alice → Bob : g, p, g^x

They must also be verified by Bob to prevent an active attacker from inserting weak parameters (and thus a weak key K). recommend against special checks to prevent this and instead suggest including the group parameters in Alice's certificate.

Variations

The variations mentioned here are from the original STS paper. See the following references for other, more significant variations.

• RFC 2412, "The OAKLEY Key Determination Protocol".
• ISO/IEC 117703, "Mechanisms Using Asymmetric Techniques", (1999).

Authentication-only STS

A simplified form of STS is available that provides mutual authentication but does not produce a shared secret. It uses random number challenges instead of the above Diffie-Hellman technique.

1. Alice generates a random number x sends it to Bob.
2. Bob generates a random number y.
3. Bob concatenates the random numbers (y, x) (order is important) and signs them using his asymmetric key B. He sends the signature along with his own random number to Alice.
4. Alice verifies Bob's signature.
5. Alice concatenates the random numbers (x, y) (order is important) and signs them using her asymmetric key A. She sends the signature to Bob.
6. Bob verifies Alice's signature.

Formally:

(1) Alice → Bob : x
(2) Alice ← Bob : y, S_B(y, x)
(3) Alice → Bob : S_A(x, y)

This protocol can be extended to include certificates as in Full STS.

STS-MAC

In cases where encryption is a not viable choice in session establishment, K can instead be used to create a MAC

Message authentication code

In cryptography, a message authentication code is a short piece of information used to authenticate a message.A MAC algorithm, sometimes called a keyed hash function, accepts as input a secret key and an arbitrary-length message to be authenticated, and outputs a MAC...

.

(1) Alice → Bob : g^x
(2) Alice ← Bob : g^y, S_B(g^y, g^x), MAC_K(S_B(g^y, g^x))
(3) Alice → Bob : S_A(g^x, g^y), MAC_K(S_A(g^x, g^y))

note that this variation may be preferable to original STS ("STS-ENC") in any case because

.. the use of encryption to provide key confirmation in STS-ENC is questionable — traditionally the sole goal of encryption is to provide confidentiality and if an encryption scheme is used to demonstrate possession of a key then it is shown by decryption, not by encryption.

The paper goes on to counsel, however, that using K for both a MAC and as the session key violates the principle that keys should not be used for more than one purpose, and presents various workarounds.

Cryptanalysis

STS-MAC is vulnerable to some unknown key-share attack

Unknown key-share attack

As defined by , an unknown key-share attack on an authenticated key agreement or authenticated key agreement with key confirmation protocol is an attack whereby an entity A ends up believing she shares a key with B, and although this is in fact the case, while B mistakenly believes the key is...

s, whereby an active attacker can inject her own identity into the session establishment procedure in place of either initiator or responder. present the vulnerabilities and some solutions