Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Protocol - Essay Example

Generally, Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange enables two parties with no prior knowledge of each other to effectively establish a joint, shared secret key over an insecure public communication channel (Blake and Garefalakis, 2004, p.27). Although Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is a non-authenticated (anonymous) key agreement protocol, it provides a basis for a diverse variety of authenticated protocols and has widely been used to provide important forward secrecy, particularly in transport layer security’s ephemeral. This paper critically reviews the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange protocol with particular focus on some of the common attacks on the protocol, potential counter-measures to mitigate or address such attacks as well as a calculation of the value of the symmetric key as well as the value of R1 and R2 in the Diffie-Hellman protocol for the given set of values. i. Denial of Service Attacks: These are the attacks against Diffie-Hellman Protocol whereby the attacker attempts to stop Alice and Bob from carrying out the protocol successfully.

This can particularly be accomplished by attackers in several ways some of which include deleting the messages sent by Alice and Bob to each other or even overwhelming the communicating parties with unnecessary communication or computation. ii. Outsider Attacks: Outsider attacks is a malicious attack in which the attackers may try to disrupt the protocol by removing, adding, or replaying the messages to retrieve some vital information that they may have otherwise not gotten just by looking at the public values. iii. Insider Attacks: This is where one of the participants in a Diffie-Hellman Protocol intentionally creates a breakable protocol in an attempt to gain knowledge of the secret key of his/her communication peer on the other side ( Kaufman, Perlman and Speciner, 2002, p.95). There are currently several countermeasures that can effectively be applied and implemented to mitigate, avoid or address the various common attacks on the Diffie-Hellman Protocol.