A troyan Diffie-Hellman-like protocol based on proof of gullibility

Abstract

In the IEEE MILCOM 2018 conference proceedings was published a paper presenting a Diffie-Hellman-like protocol, more precisely, a "lightweight key exchange protocol with provable security". In this short paper, we show that the aforementioned protocol presents a fatal flow that makes the secret key a very simple combination of the public data. We then break explicitly the protocol. As a consequence, our main aim is to warn about the intrinsic risks in this protocol and discourage its practical usage, which would cause a leak of information.