Robust two-way locking protocol for key exchange

Abstract

Sharing of symmetric key between the sender and receiver for encryption and decryption is considered to be one of the major issues in the communication networks. It is due to the fact that the strength of cryptosystem depends not only on the strength of the key, but also on the underlying key exchange protocol. In this paper, we propose a Robust Two-way Locking Protocol which overcomes the drawback of Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol in terms of flexibility provided to the sender for selecting the desired key. Moreover we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed protocol in TCP handshake and compare it with Secure TCP which is based on Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange protocol. Based on the simulation results it is observed that Robust Two-way Locking (RoToLo) Protocol incurs negligible overhead in the network while providing greater flexibility of key selection to the sender as compared to Secure TCP. © Springer-Verlag 2011.