Design of secure group key agreement protocol using elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

Secure group communication is an important research area in the field of cryptography and network security, because the group communication like electronic conferences, video chatting, video games etc. are rapidly increasing. Group key agreement protocols allow all members of the group to agree on the same session key which is used later for secure group communication. The design of secure group key agreement protocol can be very critical for achieving security goals. Many group key agreement protocols have been established for wired and wireless group communication. This paper proposes an ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) based authenticated group key agreement protocol for wireless scenario. The proposed protocol uses the concepts of elliptic curve cryptography to minimize the computation overheads and AES (Asymmetric Encryption Standards) to maintain efficiency. The proposed protocol consists of a set of users and a trusted server, where server and the user contribute to create the group key. The performance and security analysis shows that the proposed protocol is secure against passive and active attack and performs better in terms of computation and communication cost from other related protocols.