Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol - Essay Example nowledge of each other to effectively establish a joint, shared secret key over an insecure public communication channel (Blake and Garefalakis, 2004, p.27). Although diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is a non-authenticated (anonymous) key agreement protocol, it provides a basis for a diverse variety of authenticated protocols and has widely been used to provide important forward secrecy particularly in transport layer security’s ephemeral. This paper critically reviews diffie-Hellman Key Exchange protocol with particular focus to some of the common attacks on the protocol, potential counter-measures to mitigate or address such attacks as well as a calculation of the value of the symmetric key as well as the value of R1 and R2 in the diffie-Hellman protocol for the given set of values. i. Denial of Service Attacks: These are the attacks against Diffie-Hellman Protocol whereby the attacker attempts to stop Alice and Bob from carrying out the protocol successfully. This can particularly be accomplished by attackers through a number of ways some of which include deleting the messages sent by Alice and Bob to each other or even by overwhelming the communicating parties with unnecessary communication or computation. ii. Outsider Attacks: Outsider attacks is a malicious attack in which the attackers may try disrupt the protocol by removing, adding or replaying the messages in order to retrieve some vital information that they may have otherwise not gotten just by looking at the public values. iii. Insider Attacks: This is where one of the participants in a Diffie-Hellman Protocol intentionally creates a breakable protocol in an attempt to gain knowledge of the secret key of his/her communication peer on the other side ( Kaufman, Perlman and Speciner, 2002, p.95). There are currently a number of countermeasures that can effectively be applied and implemented in order to mitigate, avoid or address the various common attacks on Diffie-Hellman Protocol. For example, to