Certificateless and identity-based authenticated asymmetric group key agreement

Abstract

Group key agreement (GKA) is one of the traditional ways to guarantee the subsequent secure group communications. However, conventional GKA protocols face two limitations, i.e., they require two or more rounds to establish secure channels and are sender restricted. Asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) eliminates above two limitations of GKA. It allows a group of users to establish a public group encryption key and a different secret decryption key of each group member in one round. Any user who knows the group encryption key can encrypt to the group members. This paper studies authenticated AGKA in certificateless and identity-based public key cryptosystems. We formalize the security model of certificateless authenticated asymmetric group key agreement and realize a one-round certificateless authenticated asymmetric group key agreement protocol to resist active attacks in the real world. We also investigate the relation between certificateless authenticated AGKA and identity-based authenticated AGKA. We propose a concrete conversion from certificateless authenticated AGKA to session key escrow-free identity-based authenticated AGKA.