Attacks on Improved Key Distribution Protocols with Perfect Reparability

Abstract

In this paper, we present attacks on two improved key distribution protocol with perfect reparability that were presented at ICON 2000. First, we show that the two ldquoattacksrdquo described in their paper are trivial and do not count as attacks at all since they are well-known attacks that apply to any security system. Further, we describe several attacks on both improved protocols, and show that an illegitimate attacker could easily impersonate legitimate parties and have other parties think they are sharing keys with the impersonated party when in fact that party is not present at all.