Paper 2021/622 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2021/622 ↗

Stealth: A Highly Secured End-to-End Symmetric Communication Protocol

Abstract

Symmetric key cryptography is applied in almost all secure communications to protect all sensitive information from attackers, for instance, banking, and thus, it requires extra attention due to diverse applications. Moreover, it is vulnerable to various attacks, for example, cryptanalysis attacks. Cryptanalysis attacks are possible due to a single-keyed encryption system. The state-of-the-art symmetric communication protocol uses a single secret key to encrypt/decrypt the entire communication to exchange data/message that poses security threats. Therefore, in this paper, we present a new secure communication protocol based on Diffie-Hellman cryptographic algorithms, called Stealth. It is a symmetric-key cryptographic protocol to enhance the security of modern communication with truly random numbers. Additionally, it applies a pseudo-random number generator. Initially, Stealth uses the Diffie-Hellman algorithm to compute four shared secret keys. These shared secret keys are used to generate four different private keys to encrypt for the first block of the message for symmetric communication. Stealth changes its private keys in each communication, making it very hard to break the security protocol. Moreover, the four shared secret keys create additional complexity for the adversary to overcome, and hence, it can provide highly tight security in communications. Stealth neither replaces the existing protocol nor authentication mechanism, but it creates another security layer to the existing protocol to ensure the security measurement's tightness.