Towards Denial-of-Service-Resilient Key Agreement Protocols

Denial of service resilience is an important practical consideration for key agreement protocols in any hostile environment such as the Internet. There are well-known models that consider the security of key agreement protocols, but denial of service resilience is not considered as part of these models. Many protocols have been argued to be denial-of-service-resilient, only to be subsequently broken or shown ineffective.

In this work we propose a formal definition of denial of service resilience, a model for secure authenticated key agreement, and show how security and denial of service resilience can be considered in a common framework, with a particular focus on client puzzles. The model accommodates a variety of techniques for achieving denial of service resilience, and we describe one such technique by exhibiting a denial-of-service-resilient secure authenticated key agreement protocol. Our approach addresses the correct integration of denial of service countermeasures with the key agreement protocol to prevent hijacking attacks that would otherwise render the countermeasures irrelevant.