Cryptography

Random Oracle to prove an Authenticated DH protocol

I am trying to understand how they use the random oracle to solve the CDH. For example, in the security proof on page 7 of the following paper; A Lightweight Message Authentication Scheme for Smart Grid Communications, Fouda et al. 2001. The authors used a random oracle to break the security of an authenticated DH protocol. They assumed an adversary who can break the semantic security of the shared key and used this adversary along with a random oracle to solve CDH.

1. to my understanding a random oracle is like a hash function where the input is a random string and the output also is another random string, so how can we use to solve the CDH;
2. in the paper, they gave the adversary a tuple $$(g, g^a, g^b)$$ and allowed him to make a query to the random oracle. Then, they tracked the queries to the random oracle to monitor of $$g^{ab}$$ was queried. But Why would the adversary query g^ab to the random oracle? Is it part of the game?

Solution

Answers to your questions:

1) Random oracle - is a replacement for hash-function. Its input is any bitstring, and output - random string. In some sense - it's an ideal hash-function. But in order to evaluate it, you (attacker) need to explicitly ask the oracle.

2) "Why would the adversary query g^ab to the random oracle. Is it part of the game?" - no, adversary of course isn't obligated anything for you, and it isn't obligated to ask ROM for $$g^{ab}$$. But, easy to see, that if the attacker didn't ask oracle for $$g^{ab}$$, he has only a negligible probability of success. In the article it's simply expressed as "has no idea on the session key"; it's indeed true - recall that oracle will return some random string for this input, regardless of all previous actions/queries of the attacker. While it's not a rigorous mathematical statement, it still correctly describes what happens.

In addition, I would try to explain why this ROM model good for modeling hash function. In this proof we essentially use the fact that any attacker will explicitly ask the oracle for hash-values, and we can track all these queries. While in real life, for real hash function, we can't track attacker actions. But, if hash-function is good (ideal), to get hash-value everyone needs to honestly calculate it by applying hash-function to some input (e.g., you can't derive hash-value of some input from hash-values of other, even somehow related, inputs). So, if hash function is good enough, any successful attacker at some point should calculate hash from $$g^{ab}$$, i.e. this attacker should know $$g^{ab}$$ at some step. So, this attacker is able to solve CDH. This is a meaning of this proof in ROM. It doesn't mean that for any hash-function it's true - it's only true for good hash functions, which are really unpredictable and behave like random oracles.

Comments (3)

• +0 – Thank you for your explanation. I understand your explanation very well, but why in the paper, the authors said, they will give the attacker a random number instead of the output of ROM. I am quoting this sentence from the paper. "When the adversary makes a query on the session key, we flip a coin B belong {0,1} , and return a random value ." — Apr 27, 2020 at 18:40
• +0 – @Mona, they give random number as output of random oracle - because output of random oracle must be a random number (this is how ROM defined). Another words - for attacker, this behavior of random oracle is totally fine, it's what attacker expects from random oracle. — Apr 28, 2020 at 11:37
• +0 – Thank you very much for your help. This is very clear now. — Apr 28, 2020 at 18:14

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