Efficient Multi-Party Challenge-Response Protocols for Entity Authentication

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of multi-party entity authentication. We prove that the lower bound on the number of messages of multi-party challenge-response protocols is 2n-1, where n is the number of the participants of the protocol, and proposes two protocols that achieve this lower bound. Our protocols are, thus, efficient in the sense that they use the minimum number of messages required to solve the multi-party entity authentication problem based on challenge-response principles.