Design of ECC based authenticated group key agreement protocol using self-certified public keys

摘要

The applications like secure conferences, Pay-TV system etc. are usually requires a common key (group key) shared among the participants. The applications in which the membership of participants is updated frequently (by joining new members and/or leaving existing members), group key agreement protocols are more suitable which facilitates frequent key updations with lesser effort. In today's scenario the cryptographic protocols based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are more popular because it provides same level of security with relatively lesser key size and requires less storage. Self-certified Public Keys(SC-PKC) based group key agreement protocol is proposed in this paper. The usage of self-certified public key in the proposed protocol overcomes the certificate management problem in order to authenticate the public key, as well as removes the private key escrow problem unlike ID-based cryptosystem. As per the literature survey very few research papers uses Self-certified Public Keys in key agreement protocol (two-party). However, the proposed work is the first group key agreement protocol based which combines the advantages of ECC as well as SC-PKC. Moreover, the present paper also illustrates the performance and security analysis of the prosed protocol which shows that the proposed protocol provides the necessary security features of a group key agreement protocol and required relatively less communication and computation overheads than various existing protocols designed for similar purpose.