Secure group key agreement protocol with elliptic curve secret sharing for authentication in distributed environments

Abstract

Secure communication is crucial in today’s increasingly interconnected world, especially in distributed contexts where several parties must cooperate while maintaining confidentiality and authenticity. In order to overcome these difficulties, this work introduces a novel Secure Group Key Agreement Protocol (SGKAP) strengthened with Elliptic Curve Secret Sharing (ECSS).The proposed SGKAP uses the strength of elliptic curve cryptography to provide a shared secret key across participants, assuring data transmission confidentiality. Contrary to conventional methods, SGKAP integrates ECSS as a second layer of security to verify participant identity, thus boosting the protocol’s resistance to malevolent adversaries.To create a shared group key, members exchange their elliptic curve public keys at the start of the protocol. During this stage, ECSS is used, and participants create distinctive authentication tokens using their personal secrets. Participants exchange and verify these tokens among themselves, ensuring that only those with the proper permissions have access to the group key.In addition to guaranteeing data confidentiality, SGKAP also verifies the group members’ participation. Furthermore, by mandating secret-sharing-based authentication, ECSS strengthens the protocol’s resistance to insider attacks.We carried out a comprehensive set of simulations and experiments in various distributed contexts to assess the performance and security of SGKAP with ECSS.