SECURE AND MINIMAL PROTOCOLS FOR AUTHENTICATED KEY DISTRIBUTION

The problem of secure key distribution has been the subject of much at tention in recent years. This paper describes a novel-method for authe nticated key distribution in the distributed systems environment. In p articular, a braiding technique for key distribution is introduced. Th e underlying protocols are extremely compact in both the number of mes sages and message sizes, which facilitates their application at any la yer (at lower layers, in particular) in the protocol hierarchy. Furthe rmore, the protocols are shown to be resistant to a wide range of inte rleaving attacks. All this is achieved with minimal computational requ irements, and without the necessity of using traditional encryption (a strong one-way function suffices).