Ternary Tree based Group Key Agreement Protocol Over Elliptic Curve for Dynamic Group

Abstract

group communication is an active area of research and its popularity is fuelled by the growing importance of group oriented internet applications such as voice & video conferences, pay per view, etc. Several groupware applications like video conferences, distributed computations, etc requires secure transmission while communicating over the Internet. For secure communication, the integrity of the messages, member authentication, and confidentiality are must be provided among group members. To provide message integrity all group members must be agreed up on a common group key to encrypt and decrypt the messages. This paper proposes an efficient and contributory group key agreement protocol and also support dynamic operations like join, leave, merge, etc. by using ECC based Diffie Hellman key exchange. This protocol employs ternary tree like structure instead of binary tree in the process of group key generation. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with that of several others existing schemes in literature and it is found that the proposed one is performs well in terms of communication and computation cost. In addition, the formal security validation is done using AVISPA tool that demonstrated that the proposed protocol is safe against passive and active attacks.