Deviation-Driven Adaptive AKE (DDA-AKE): Making Anomalies First-Class Citizens in Key Exchange

Most AKE designs aim for strict constant-time behavior and failure-hiding, but real systems deviate—ephemeral secret leakage (ESL), desynchronization, or transport jitter happen. Building on Ayub et al. (2025), who explicitly model ESL and desynchronization threats in smart-grid settings with ECC+PUF, this idea formalizes a “deviation budget” and an adaptive state machine in the AKE: when decapsulation failures (notorious in some PQ KEMs) or runtime anomalies exceed an expected distributional bound, the protocol elevates its posture—e.g., forces explicit key confirmation, switches to a backup KEM (see Kuznetsov et al., 2023 on BIKE/HQC/Classic McEliece trade-offs), injects fresh entropy, or rebinds to device PUFs. This could be retrofitted into network-level protocols (Pazienza et al., 2022 on IKEv2 in the post-quantum era; Mahyob et al., 2022 on single-stage IKE variants) and media settings (Park et al., 2023 for E2EE video conferencing), where transport-induced anomalies are common. The novelty is to specify and prove security of AKEs that treat deviations as inputs to a reactive policy rather than merely leakage—essentially a cryptographic tripwire: if observed behavior diverges from the calibrated baseline, the AKE automatically increases assurance. Impact: more robust deployments that degrade safely under active attacks, ESL, or network turbulence, especially in large, mobile, or IoT deployments where perfect constancy is unrealistic.

References:

1. End-to-End Post-Quantum Cryptography Encryption Protocol for Video Conferencing System Based on Government Public Key Infrastructure. Yeongjae Park, H. Yoo, Jieun Ryu, Young-Rak Choi, Ju-Sung Kang, Yongjin Yeom (2023). Applied System Innovation.
2. Provably Secure Efficient Key-Exchange Protocol for Intelligent Supply Line Surveillance in Smart Grids. Muhammad Faizan Ayub, Xiong Li, Khalid Mahmood, Mohammed J. F. Alenazi, Ashok Kumar Das, Guijuan Wang (2025). IEEE Internet of Things Journal.
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