Efficient provably-secure privacy-preserving signature-based key establishment protocol

Assuring the security and privacy of users in today's ever-growing digital communications is of prime significance. In a digital communication, in order to preserve the identities and confidential information of individuals, and more significantly, to prevent any unauthorized access and manipulation, the user and server need to establish a shared key. In recent years, a number of key establishment protocols have been put forward to keep the integrity, confidentiality, and anonymity of participants. Nonetheless, investigating the literature reveals the fact that the existing schemes cannot entirely assuage the desired security requirements. Therefore, in this paper, considering the computational efficiency, we propose a novel privacy-preserving signature-based key establishment protocol, which can guarantee subsequent secure communications of users and servers. To indicate that the proposed scheme can withstand the known attacks, we present a rigorous formal security proof and verification by utilization of two stateof-the-art techniques, i.e., the random oracle model and ProVerif tool. Further, to show that the proposed protocol has proper performance, we compare our scheme with several recently-published schemes. The achieved results evince that the proposed scheme has a proper level of efficiency and is the best in terms of security provision. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.