Design of Attribute Based Authenticated Group Key Agreement Protocol Without Pairing

Abstract

The paper present a multi-party attribute based authenticated key agreement protocol without using bilinear pairing. Attribute based key agreement is needed in verity of applications wherever a fine grained access control is required like design of access control for cloud storage, military applications, broadcast encryption etc. Such applications usually need to establish, a secure session among the participants without knowing their actual identities for subsequent cryptographic (symmetric key) operations. Instead of identities, the participants are authenticates based on a descriptive set of attributes (called as access policy). As per the literature-survey the protocols based on attribute based authentication presented so far requires bilinear pairing computations. Since the implementation of pairing is much costlier than ordinary scalar point multiplication over elliptic curve. Therefore pairing free protocols over attribute-based authentication is much desirable especially in resource constraint network. The present paper employs elliptic curve arithmetic along with Lagrange interpolation instead of bilinear pairing computations. The authentication process of the protocol is information theoretically secure while the confidentiality of the shared key relies on the intractability of Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP).