A Novel Machine Learning-Based Approach for Security Analysis of Authentication and Key Agreement Protocols

Abstract

The application of machine learning in the security analysis of authentication and key agreement protocol was first launched by Ma et al. in 2018. Although they received remarkable results with an accuracy of 72% for the first time, their analysis is limited to replay attack and key confirmation attack. In addition, their suggested framework is based on a multiclassification problem in which every protocol or dataset instance is either secure or prone to a security attack such as replay attack, key confirmation, or other attacks. In this paper, we show that multiclassification is not an appropriate framework for such analysis, since authentication protocols may suffer different attacks simultaneously. Furthermore, we consider more security properties and attacks to analyze protocols against. These properties include strong authentication and Unknown Key Share (UKS) attack, key freshness, key authentication, and password guessing attack. In addition, we propose a much more efficient dataset construction model using a tenth number of features, which improves the solving speed to a large extent. The results indicate that our proposed model outperforms the previous models by at least 10–20 percent in all of the machine learning solving algorithms such that upper-bound performance reaches an accuracy of over 80% in the analysis of all security properties and attacks. Despite the previous models, the classification accuracy of our proposed dataset construction model rises in a rational manner along with the increase of the dataset size.