Secure Key Exchange and Sessions Without Credentials.
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Secure communication is a fundamental cryptographic primitive. Typically, security is achieved by relying on an existing credential infrastructure, such as a PKI or passwords, for identifying the end points to each other. But what can be obtained when no such credential infrastructure is available? Clearly, when there is no pre-existing credential infrastructure, an adversary can mount successful “man in the middle ” attacks by modifying the communication between the legitimate endpoints. Still, we show that not all is lost, as long as the adversary’s control over the communication is not complete: We present relatively efficient key exchange and secure session protocols that provide the full guarantee of secure communication as long as the adversary fails to intercept even a single message between the legitimate endpoints. To obtain this guarantee we strengthen the notion of key exchange to require that the keys exchanged in any two sessions are independent of each other as long as each session has at least one honest endpoint, even if both sessions has an adversarial endpoint. We call this notion credential-free key exchange. We then strengthen the existing notion of secure session protocols to provide the above guarantee given a CFKE (existing definitions and constructions are insufficient for this purpose). We provide two alternative definitions and constructions of CFKE, a game-based one with a construction in the RO model, and a UC one with a construction in the CRS model.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it