A Pairing Free Attribute-Based Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol Using ECC

Abstract

This paper presents a two party attribute based authenticated key agreement protocol without using bilinear pairing. Attribute based key agreement is required in several applications wherever a fine grained access control is required like cloud storage, military applications, broadcast encryption etc. In several applications a secure session between the participants is established without knowing their actual identities. In that case in place of identities a descriptive set of attributes (called as access policy) is used. The participants having sufficient set of attributes that satisfy the access policy are considered as authenticated and eligible for key establishment. The present paper uses Shamir Secret Sharing, Diffie Hellman Key exchange and elliptic curve arithmetic instead of bilinear pairing computations. The participant is authenticated based on the access policy defined over the set of attributes. The participant who satisfies the set of attributes perform Diffie Hellman key exchange with the other participant. Thus, a secure key is established between the participants. The authentication process of this protocol is information theoretically secure while the confidentiality rely on the intractability of Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). abstract environment.