Just looking at this description, a (very) minor comment is that each party 
needs to not only keep the static key secure, but also to keep S (a static 
value) secret. If S is revealed, the effect is equivalent to having the 
long-term private key revealed within the context of two-party communication. 
In addition, you may also need to include the user identities somewhere (to 
prevent unknown key sharing attacks), either in the key exchange flows or in 
the key derivation. If you take all these into account, you will probably come 
to something similar to Naxos.

In 2010, I wrote a paper published at FC'10 
(https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/136.pdf) and described a different approach. 
Rather than listing triple DH in separate terms, I argued it may be better to 
merge them in just one term as follows (G is the base point, a,b are static 
keys and a', b' are ephemeral):

Alice -> Bob: a'G, ZKP{a'}
Bob -> Alice: b'G, ZKP{b'}

K = KDF( (a+a') (b+b') G ).

Although it uses ZKP (Schnorr in particular), the overall efficiency is 
comparable to that in NAXOS (see Table 1 on p. 9 in the above link), but the 
protocol is simpler and neater. Personally, I prefer simplicity than complexity.

There is also short summary of the protocol at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAK_%28cryptography%29

Cheers,
Feng

From: William Whyte 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 22:31:55 -0400
To: Tony Arcieri <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, 
"[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Subject: Re: [curves] Forward secrecy with "triple Diffie-Hellman"

My understanding, though I’m having trouble tracking down the reference at the 
moment, is that standard ephemeral-static DH has good properties and takes one 
less exponentiation:

  S = aB = bA
  S’ = a’B’ = b’A’
  K = KDF (S || S’)

Do you have a reason to prefer the triple version?

This version is defined in X9.42 as dhHybrid1, and X9.42 contains various 
security claims about the properties of this approach, but it was written in 
2003 and analysis has got more rigorous since then so there may be more 
up-to-date statements about it.

Cheers

William


From: Curves 
[mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>]
 On Behalf Of Tony Arcieri
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 9:18 PM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: [curves] Forward secrecy with "triple Diffie-Hellman"

Trevor described this idea to me once and I haven't really seen it written down 
anywhere. It's an alternative to something like the CurveCP handshake for a 
transport encryption protocol which provides forward secrecy by deriving a 
unique session key each time using ephemeral D-H keys. It couples 
authentication to confidentiality in ways that might bother some, but at the 
same time is incredibly simple and I think that's an advantage in and of itself.

Let's say Alice has the following elliptic curve D-H keys:

a: long-lived private key
A: long-lived public key

Alice will also generate a' and A' for each session, which are short-lived 
session keys.

Bob likewise has b, B , b', and B' respectively.

Alice can do:

  a * B' || a' * B' || a' * B

(The "*" character here represents Curve25519 scalar multiplication)

Bob can do the reciprocal operation and derive the same shared secret string:

  b * A' || b' * A' || b' * A

These secret strings can then be used as input to a KDF to create a session key.

If these keys haven't been tampered with in-flight, Alice and Bob should derive 
the same session key, and can authenticate each other via their long-lived 
public keys.

Does this seem correct, and if so, does anyone know of any literature on this 
approach?

--
Tony Arcieri
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