Asymmetric Group Key Agreement Protocol Research Articles

Asymmetric Group Key Agreement Protocol Based on Blockchain and Attribute for Industrial Internet of Things

In the era of Industry 4.0, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been applied to help physical entities to access real-time data in the network and share critical information. However, both the decentralization of IIoT and the heterogeneity of different devices constituting IIoT also pose a serious threat to secure communication between entities. Although the encryption technologies can ensure the confidentiality of communication data, the security of key becomes more important for devices in IIoT. Recently, some asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) protocols have been proposed to negotiate a common encryption key for group members, and each group member holds its decryption key. However, the existing AGKA protocols fail to effectively control the access of agreement participants in IIoT. To solve this problem, in this article, we propose an AGKA protocol based on blockchain and attribute for IIoT. The proposed protocol not only realizes the access control of agreement participants but also realizes the automation of access control, the tamper resistance, and the nonrepudiation of the agreement process. The security and performance analysis of the proposed protocol show that it is more secure and effective compared with the existing AGKA protocols.

Efficient sharing of privacy-preserving sensing data on consortium blockchain via group key agreement

Due to the self-organizing and distributed nature of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), valuable data in sensor networks faces security and privacy risks. A blockchain-based approach enables secure and convenient sharing of sensor information among different users. Compared to public and private blockchains, consortium blockchain is widely used across different industries and use cases in WSN due to its auditability and high transaction rate. However, sensing data sharing via consortium blockchain raises the privacy issue. Therefore, the data from the sensor node is encrypted by the key (named sensorkey) shared by the sensor node and the sink node and then sent to the blockchain network to not reveal the privacy of the sensing data. Since the infrastructure in large-scale WSN is usually owned and managed by multiple organizations, encrypted sensing data needs to be authorized by these multiple organizations for computation. Organizations requesting privacy-preserving data are referred to as data sharers. Distributing the sensorkey to each data sharer requires separate encryption of the key using the data sharer’s public key. The sink node needs to be online when each data sharer asks for the sensorkey, and one encryption of the sensorkey for each data sharer consumes precious resources. This work proposes GSChain for efficient privacy-preserving sensing data sharing on consortium blockchain. Multiple data sharers resort to asymmetric group key agreement protocol to maintain a shared group encryption key and their respective group decryption keys, enabling efficient sensorkey retrieval from the consortium blockchain. The sensorkey is encrypted only once by the group encryption key and stored on the consortium blockchain along with the privacy-preserving sensing data. Our scheme improves the efficiency of privacy-preserving data sharing among multiple data sharers while reducing the online demand for sink nodes. Although the data-sharing group should remain stable for a long time, we design the group key update scheme. We also discuss how old and new data sharers access different ranges of privacy-preserving sensing data as the data-sharing group changes. We build a complete implementation of GSChain based on the Hyperledger Fabric framework and conduct a comprehensive set of experimental studies. Our experimental results demonstrate that GSChain improves the privacy-preserving sensing data sharing efficiency with tolerable time and storage overhead. In addition, the time overhead caused by the recovery of the GSChain system is tolerable when the membership of the data-sharing group changes.

Pairing free asymmetric group key agreement protocol

More and more applications are nowadays distributed and rely on collaborative input. Group key protocols, enabling the construction of a common shared key, are the most evident primitive to efficiently provide the required authentication and confidentiality in the group. Asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) protocols allow the construction of a common shared public key, where only the participants in the group possessing different private keys are able to decrypt messages encrypted by means of this group public key. Up to now, all the proposed AGKA protocols in literature rely on compute intensive pairing operations, which are too highly demanding for resource constrained devices. We propose in this paper a one-round lightweight elliptic curve based alternative, being able to offer in addition also self-certification to the members of the group due to the usage of Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone certificates. We show drastic improvements with respect to both communication and computation costs, compared to the pairing based approaches.

Pairing Free Certified Common Asymmetric Group Key Agreement Protocol for Data Sharing Among Users with Different Access Rights.

Research into a pandemic like Covid-19 needs a tremendous input of patient histories and characteristics. Patients and doctors are only willing to share these sensitive data when they are ensured that the data are solely used by legitimate research laboratories. Asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) protocols provide a good cryptographic primitive to address this requirement. The AGKA protocols proposed in literature provide users with a common public group key and a different decryption key by relying on compute intensive pairing operations. In this paper, we propose a new primitive, called the Common AGKA (CAGKA) protocol in which the users share the same private-public key pair, resulting in a more efficient solution. By combining Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone certificates and a recently proposed Canetti–Krawczyk (CK) secure mutual authentication protocol, a one round self-certified pairing free CAGKA protocol is defined, which can be also globally certified after one additional round.

Group key agreement protocol among terminals of the intelligent information system for mobile edge computing

Security communication and information sharing among mobile devices are important application technologies of the intelligent information system (IIS). Because IIS is vulnerable to attacks, so the security of information sharing among mobile devices is seriously threatened. Thence, it is necessary to establish a secure channel for communication among mobile devices of IIS over an opening network. Group key agreement (GKA) can establish a secure channel among mobile devices of IIS by encryption technology. Due to the resource-constraints of mobile devices, such as weak computing power, small storage capacity, and limited communication range. To address these issues, an asymmetric GKA protocol among terminals of IIS for mobile edge computing (GKA–IIS–MEC) network is proposed in this paper. Adopted asymmetric GKA to achieve the group secure communication mechanisms that message sender unfettered in this protocol; the protocol also uses edge computing environment to migrate the computation and communication loads of mobile devices of IIS to edge nodes, thereby ensuring that mobile devices have lightweight computation and communication loads; and the members participating in the GKA can verify whether the group session keys they calculated are correctness. Under the hardness assumption of bilinear inverse Diffie–Hellman problem, the proposed protocol is proven that it can resist negative attacks. After evaluating the performance of the protocol, GKA–IIS–MEC has higher efficiency than the referred works in terms of time cost, communication consumption, and computation consumption.

An asymmetric group key agreement protocol based on attribute threshold for Internet of Things

AbstractWith the development of wireless mobile network and Internet of Things (IoT), users enter the network with a large amount of data and information, including some important personal information, such as ID number, telephone number. Personal privacy disclosure has become one of the focuses of attention. In this article, we propose an asymmetric group key agreement (GKA) protocol based on attribute threshold for IoT to protect user privacy. Users do not need to expose any personal information in the group, but only need to meet the same number of attributes and conduct bidirectional authentication registration with key generation center (KGC) to ensure the legitimacy of mobile terminal members participating in GKA. In the registration phase, user performs heavy preliminary calculations according to the designed protocol, thereby reducing the computation in the key agreement phase and decreasing the complexity of the protocol. The protocol can realize self‐verification, and any member participating in key agreement can verify the correctness of the negotiated key by themselves. Under the assumption of bilinear computational Diffie‐Hellman problem, the security of the protocol is proved. Performance analysis further shows that our protocol has lower energy consumption in terms of communication and computing.

Blockchain-based asymmetric group key agreement protocol for internet of vehicles

Data sharing and group communication are the main applications for Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV has some obvious characteristics, such as terminals resources are limited, sensitive information is easy to leak and the whole network is vulnerable to some attacks. Therefore, in the process of terminal communication for IoV, it is urgent to construct an efficient group key to encrypt the communication contents to protect the security of communication contents and user’s privacy. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based asymmetric group key agreement protocol for IoV (B-AGKA), in which blockchain anonymous authentication technology is adopted to achieve user’s privacy protection. And in this scheme, the calculation is distributed to each node in a balanced manner, reducing the calculation and communication overhead; for traceability and accountability, the blockchain logging techniques are adopted. In the whole process, we show that the proposed protocol is proven secure under the hardness assumption of decision bilinear Diffie–Hellman (DBDH) problem. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than existing works.

Dynamic asymmetric group key agreement protocol with traitor traceability

In asymmetric group key agreement (ASGKA) protocols, a group of users establish a common encryption key which is publicly accessible and compute pairwise different decryption keys. It is left as an open problem to design an ASGKA protocol with traitor traceability in Eurocrypt 2009. A one-round dynamic authenticated ASGKA protocol with public traitor traceability is proposed in this study. It provides a black-box tracing algorithm. Ind-CPA security with key compromise impersonation resilience (KCIR) and forward secrecy of ASGKA protocols is formally defined. The proposed protocol is proved to be Ind-CPA secure with KCIR and forward secrecy under D k-HDHE assumption. It is also proved that the proposed protocol resists collusion attack. In Setup algorithm and Join algorithm, one communication round is required. In Leave algorithm, no message is required to be transmitted. The proposed protocol adopts O ( log ⁡ N ) -way asymmetric multilinear map to make the size of public key and the size of ciphertext both achieve O ( log ⁡ N ) , where N is the number of potential group members. This is the first ASGKA protocol with public traitor traceability which is more efficient than trivial construction of ASGKA protocols.

An authenticated hierarchical asymmetric group key agreement protocol based on identity

Asymmetric group key agreement protocol is to negotiate a shared group encryption key. Each member can calculate a decryption key corresponding to the encryption key. With the rapid development of network and system technology, secure information exchange has been one of the foci. In this paper, we propose an authenticated hierarchical asymmetric group key agreement protocol based on identity. Based on the realisation of a round of asymmetric group key agreement, the protocol carries out a second round of agreement. Different levels of secrets exchange information between a group of players with different permissions as the number of rounds increases, which can achieve anonymity and authentication and support dynamic group key updating of nodes to achieve forward and backward security of group key. The protocol proved to be secure under the assumption of bilinear computational Diffie-Hellman problem. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is efficient.

An authenticated hierarchical asymmetric group key agreement protocol based on identity

Asymmetric group key agreement protocol is to negotiate a shared group encryption key. Each member can calculate a decryption key corresponding to the encryption key. With the rapid development of network and system technology, secure information exchange has been one of the foci. In this paper, we propose an authenticated hierarchical asymmetric group key agreement protocol based on identity. Based on the realisation of a round of asymmetric group key agreement, the protocol carries out a second round of agreement. Different levels of secrets exchange information between a group of players with different permissions as the number of rounds increases, which can achieve anonymity and authentication and support dynamic group key updating of nodes to achieve forward and backward security of group key. The protocol proved to be secure under the assumption of bilinear computational Diffie-Hellman problem. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is efficient.

An authenticated asymmetric group key agreement based on attribute encryption

Secure communication among terminals in a group is necessary in Internet of Things (IoT). Such as, the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is used to communicate with the vehicles to give alert for weather conditions, road defects, traffic conditions, etc. However, people are also worried about two major security issues: privacy and authentication. Under an open and untrusted network, common secret keys which are negotiated by group terminals through group key agreement are used to realize encryption communication among group members. Personal identity information is exposed and privacy cannot be protected under the traditional identity-based authenticated asymmetric group key agreement protocol. Therefore, an authenticated asymmetric group key agreement based on attribute encryption (ABE-AAGKA) is proposed, which combines the advantages of attribute encryption and identity authentication. Attribute encryption and authentication techniques are adopted to guarantee the secure of group key agreement, and protect the personal privacy. Moreover, calculate and communicate loads are able to be moved to powerful server through the protocol to reduce the workload on intelligent terminal under the imbalanced mobile networks. The proposed protocol is proven to be secure under the inverse computational Diffie-Hellman (ICDH) problem assumption. Performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than existing works.

A Specific‐Targeting Asymmetric Group Key Agreement for Cloud Computing

When the information is exchanged and transmitted among the group members in mobile cloud environment, the group members may distribute different security domains. The information exchanged among group members may have different secret levels in this environment. When a person has some secret information, he only wants to share these information with some people who have the appropriate level of security permissions, other than all the members in the group. Aiming at these needs, we propose a flexible Asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) protocol that information exchange and transmission are specific-targeting. The paper adopts bilinear mapping and two-way anonymous authentication technology to hide personal identity authentication information, and uses storage and computing migration technology to reduce the resource consumption of mobile terminal, and also proposes the secret key factor oriented extraction and combinations technology to achieve multi-level three-dimensional complex space security information exchange requirements and meet the lightweight computing. The analysis proves that the protocol has good safety performance and low resource consumption.

A Strongly Secure and Efficient Certificateless Authenticated Asymmetric Group Key Agreement Protocol

A Strongly Secure and Efficient Certificateless Authenticated Asymmetric Group Key Agreement Protocol

Sender dynamic, non-repudiable, privacy-preserving and strong secure group communication protocol

Establishing a secure communication channel among a group of individuals is a critical issue in group oriented applications. In implementation, besides the basic confidentiality requirement, we also expect the group communications to be sender dynamic, forward secure, non-repudiable and privacy preserving. Traditional approaches, i.e., group key agreement and broadcast encryption cannot achieve the above requirements simultaneously and efficiently. In this paper, we propose our solution to secure group communications using a new security tool called identity based asymmetric group key agreement protocol with sender non-reputation and privacy. The new notion allows a group of users to negotiate a common group encryption key and their respective group decryption keys. After that, users inside/outside the group who have the knowledge of the group encryption key are able to send non-repudiable and privacy-preserving messages to the group confidentially. Further, even all the users’ private keys are later corrupted, the messages broadcasted previously remain secure. Following this definition, we propose a concrete protocol which is proven to be secure against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA) directly. We also show the potential applications of our new protocol in instant messaging applications, such as Whatsapp, Wechat, Messenger.

Certificateless and identity-based authenticated asymmetric group key agreement

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.

A collusion attack on asymmetric group key exchange

In Eurocrypt 2009, Wu et al. introduced the notion of asymmetric group key agreement ASGKA and presented a generic construction of ASGKA protocols with one communication round. Most of ASGKA protocols are designed under that generic construction. In asymmetric group key agreement protocols, users obtain different decryption keys. Any subset of group members may collude to construct pirate decryption keys, which are different from those of colluders but can correctly decrypt ciphertexts. If a pirate decryption box is found, it is possible to find traitors since their decryption keys are related to their identities. In this paper, a collusion attack on the generic construction of ASGKA by Wu et al. is proposed. It is formally proved that each of colluders participating in the proposed collusion attack is unable to be traced. The attack is additionally applied to a concrete protocol to exemplify the collusion attack. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

One-Round Affiliation-Hiding Authenticated Asymmetric Group Key Agreement with Semi-trusted Group Authority

Affiliation-Hiding Authenticated Asymmetric Group Key Agreement (AH-AAGKA) protocol can be utilized by the members of a group to authenticate each other secretly. The participants affiliated to the group can execute the AH-AAGKA protocol to establish a common encryption key. Any legitimate participant can compute its own decryption key corresponding to the encryption key. Particularly, every legitimate player's affiliation information is only revealed to other legitimate players. In this paper, we present a one-round AH-AAGKA protocol. Compared with previous work, in our protocol, Group Authority (GA) does not need to be fully trusted (we call it semi-trusted). Therefore, GA cannot impersonate any honest user to execute the protocol. Meanwhile, GA can trace group members through analyzing the communication flows. Our protocol holds the affiliation-hiding property and detectability. Additionally, our scheme exhibits Perfect Forward Secrecy for both GA and outside attackers.

Efficient Certificateless Authenticated Asymmetric Group Key Agreement Protocol

Group key agreement (GKA) is a cryptographic primitive allowing two or more users to negotiate a shared session key over public networks. Wu et al. recently introduced the concept of asymmetric GKA that allows a group of users to negotiate a common public key, while each user only needs to hold his/her respective private key. However, Wu et al.’s protocol can not resist active attacks, such as fabrication. To solve this problem, Zhang et al. proposed an authenticated asymmetric GKA protocol, where each user is authenticated during the negotiation process, so it can resist active attacks. Whereas, Zhang et al.’s protocol needs a partially trusted certificate authority to issue certificates, which brings a heavy certificate management burden. To eliminate such cost, Zhang et al. constructed another protocol in identity-based setting. Unfortunately, it suffers from the so-called key escrow problem. In this paper, we propose the certificateless authenticated asymmetric group key agreement protocol which does not have certificate management burden and key escrow problem. Besides, our protocol achieves known-key security, unknown key-share security, key-compromise impersonation security, and key control security. Our simulation based on the pairing-based cryptography (PBC) library shows that this protocol is efficient and practical.

Asymmetric group key agreement protocol for open networks and its application to broadcast encryption

Asymmetric group key agreement is a recently introduced versatile cryptographic primitive. It allows a group of users to negotiate a common encryption key which is accessible to any entities, and each user only holds her respective secret decryption key. This concept not only enables confidential communications among group users but also permits any outsider to send encrypted messages to the group. The existing instantiation is only secure against passive adversaries. In this paper, we first introduce an authenticated asymmetric group key agreement protocol which offers security against active attacks in open networks. Based on this protocol, we then propose a broadcast encryption system without relying on a trusted dealer to distribute the secret keys to the users. Our system is equipped with the perfect forward security property and has short ciphertexts. Improved systems are also described to allow a sender to select receivers for broadcast encryption and to balance the transmission overhead against the ciphertext size.

Provably secure one-round identity-based authenticated asymmetric group key agreement protocol

The newly introduced notion of asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) enables external users to securely send messages to group members. The existing AGKA is only secure against passive attacks which are too weak to capture the attacks in the real world. In this paper, we formalize an active security model for identity-based authenticated asymmetric group key agreement (IB-AAGKA). We then present an efficient identity-based batch multi-signature, from which we construct an IB-AAGKA protocol. Our protocol is proven secure under the Bilinear Diffie–Hellman Exponent (BDHE) assumption. The active security feature implies that the protocol can withstand more realistic attacks. The identity-based feature eliminates the need of certificates and solves the certificate management problem in traditional public-key cryptosystems. Finally, an effective trade-off is provided to balance the protocol transcript size and the ciphertext size.