Symmetric Asynchronous Ratcheted Communication with Associated Data

Following up mass surveillance and privacy issues, modern secure communication protocols now seek strong security, such as forward secrecy and post-compromise security, in the face of state exposures. To address this problem, ratcheting was thereby introduced, widely used in real-world messaging protocols like Signal. However, ratcheting comes with a high cost. Recently, Caforio et al. proposed pragmatic constructions which compose a weakly secure “light” protocol and a strongly secure “heavy” protocol, in order to achieve the so-called ratcheting on demand. The light protocol they proposed has still a high complexity. In this paper, we prove the security of the lightest possible protocol we could imagine, which essentially encrypts then hashes the secret key. We prove it without any random oracle by introducing a new security notion in the standard model. Our protocol composes well with the generic transformation techniques by Caforio et al. to offer high security and performance at the same time.