Abstract:After the fact that an adversary obtains an actor's long-term secret key, the adversary may impersonate other actors or obtain secrete information with the key. This kind of attack is called AKC (Actor Key Compromise) attack. Except for key exchange protocols, not much attention has been paid on other types of security protocols in the research of AKC attacks. In this paper, we consider this AKC problem and provide systematic analysis of AKC attacks, its attack patterns and countermeasures. Based on experimental analysis, this paper classifies four AKC attack patterns, and three corresponding protocol models and design principles to protect against AKC attacks. Based on these models and principles, it proposes a heuristic algorithm that transforms a protocol into an AKCS one (that keeps security property under AKC attacks). As case studies, it apply the algorithm on protocols including Email, SET and Kerberos. The results show that these protocols are vulnerable to AKC attacks, but after the transformation by the algorithm, they are no longer vulnerable to such attacks.