Group Key Establishment Protocol Research Articles

Quantum-Safe Group Key Establishment Protocol from Lattice Trapdoors.

Group communication enables Internet of Things (IoT) devices to communicate in an efficient and fast manner. In most instances, a group message needs to be encrypted using a cryptographic key that only devices in the group know. In this paper, we address the problem of establishing such a key using a lattice-based one-way function, which can easily be inverted using a suitably designed lattice trapdoor. Using the notion of a bad/good basis, we present a new method of coupling multiple private keys into a single public key, which is then used for encrypting a group message. The protocol has the apparent advantage of having a conjectured resistance against potential quantum-computer-based attacks. All functions—key establishment, session key update, node addition, encryption, and decryption—are effected in constant time, using simple linear-algebra operations, making the protocol suitable for resource-constrained IoT networks. We show how a cryptographic session group key can be constructed on the fly by a user with legitimate credentials, making node-capture-type attacks impractical. The protocol also incorporates a mechanism for node addition and session-key generation in a forward- and backward-secrecy-preserving manner.

Practical KGC-Free Polynomial-Based Multiple Group Keys Agreement for IoT Health Care Systems

Although nowadays lots of group key agreement schemes have been presented, most of these protocols generate a secret key for a single group. However, in the IoT HCS, more and more communications are involved in multiple groups and users can join multiple groups to communicate at the same time. Therefore, applying the conventional public-key-based one-at-a-time group key establishment protocols has heavy computational cost or suffer from security vulnerabilities. At the same time, in an IoT HCS, a trusted KGC is usually not available and so more flexible self-organized multigroup keys generation will be desired by all group members. In order to address this issue, a practical scheme for efficient and flexible KGC-free polynomial-based multigroup key establishments for IoT HCS is proposed. The proposed protocol can generate multiple group keys for all group members at once, instead of generating one key each time for a single group; more importantly, there is no need for a trusted KGC in the process of group keys establishment and each user can join multiple groups at the same time using only one reserved share. Meanwhile, the security of the proposed protocol is discussed in detail. Finally, we compare this protocol with the latest related group key distribution protocols in performance analysis. The results show that this efficient and flexible KGC-free polynomial-based multiple group keys establishment protocol is more suitable for practical group key agreement in IoT HCS.

Cryptanalysis of a Group Key Establishment Protocol

In this paper, we analyze the security of a group key establishment scheme proposed by López-Ramos et al. This proposal aims at allowing a group of users to agree on a common key. We present several attacks against the security of the proposed protocol. In particular, an active attack is presented, and it is also proved that the protocol does not provide forward secrecy.

Attribute-Based Authenticated Group Key Transfer Protocol without Pairing

Group key establishment protocol is the primary requirement of several group-ware applications, like secure conferences, pay per view, collaborative work space that needs to establish a secure session among a group of participants. However, some of the applications often need to establish a secure session among the participants without knowing their actual identities. In such cases, the legitimacy of participants is decided based up on a descriptive set of attributes usually called as access structure. The participants should have sufficient set of attributes to satisfy the access structure, which are to consider as authenticated and eligible for the group conversation. This paper introducing an attribute based authenticated group key transfer protocol without using bilinear pairing. Group key management based on attributes gives fine-grained access control over the group of members that are authenticated by the set of attributes. The proposed protocol uses, Shamir Secret Sharing and elliptic curve arithmetic instead of bilinear pairing computations. The members are authenticated based on the access structure defined by the session initiator. The group key is securely transferred to only those participants, who are authenticated by their attributes. The authentication process of proposed protocol is information theoretically secure, while the key confidentiality relies on the intractability of Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem.

Building Group Key Establishment on Group Theory: A Modular Approach

A group key establishment protocol is presented and proven secure in the common reference string mode. The protocol builds on a group-theoretic assumption, and a concrete example can be obtained with a decision Diffie–Hellman assumption. The protocol is derived from a two-party solution by means of a protocol compiler presented by Abdalla et al. at TCC 2007, evidencing the possibility of meaningfully integrating cryptographic and group-theoretic tools in cryptographic protocol design. This compiler uses a standard ring configuration, where all users behave symmetrically, exchanging keys with their left and right neighbor, which are later combined to yield a shared group key.

Security issues in a group key establishment protocol

Major shortcomings in a recently published group key establishment protocol are described. These shortcomings are sufficiently serious that the protocol should not be used.

Comparison of group key establishment protocols

Recently group-oriented applications over unsecure open networks such as Internet or wireless networks have become very popular. Thus, group communication security over unsecure open networks has become a vital concern. Group key establishment (GKE) protocols are used to satisfy the confidentiality requirement of a newly started communication session by the generation or sharing of an ephemeral common key between the group members. In this study, we analyze the computation and communication efficiency of GKE protocols. Besides confidentiality, the security characteristics of identification and integrity control are also required for all steps of the protocol implementations. Thus, the main contribution of this work is to provide the computation and communication efficiency analysis of the same GKE protocols along with the identification of the group entities and integrity control of messages during the protocol steps. The specific implementation and analysis of GKE protocols are performed by group key agreement (GKA) with pairing-based cryptography and group key distribution (GKD) with verifiable secret sharing, respectively. Finally, a comparison of GKA and GKD protocols on the basis of their strong points and cost characteristics are also provided to inform potential users.

A Novel Design of Membership Authentication and Group Key Establishment Protocol

A new type of authentication, called group authentication, has been proposed recently which can authenticate all users belonging to the same group at once in a group communication. However, the group authentication can only detect the existence of nonmembers but cannot identify who are the nonmembers. Furthermore, in a group communication, it needs not only to authenticate memberships but also to establish a group key among all members. In this paper, we propose a novel design to provide both membership authentication and group key establishment. Our proposed membership authentication can not only detect nonmembers but also identify who are the nonmembers. We first propose a basic membership authentication and key establishment protocol which can only support one-time group communication. Then, we extend the basic protocol to support multiple group communications. Our design is unique since tokens of users issued by a group manager (GM) during registration are used for both membership authentication and group key establishment.

Centralized Group Key Establishment Protocol without a Mutually Trusted Third Party

The type of centralized group key establishment protocols is the most commonly used one due to its efficiency in computation and communication. A key generation center (KGC) in this type of protocols acts as a server to register users initially. Since the KGC selects a group key for group communication, all users must trust the KGC. Needing a mutually trusted KGC can cause problem in some applications. For example, users in a social network cannot trust the network server to select a group key for a secure group communication. In this paper, we remove the need of a mutually trusted KGC by assuming that each user only trusts himself. During registration, each user acts as a KGC to register other users and issue sub-shares to other users. From the secret sharing homomorphism, all sub-shares of each user can be combined into a master share. The master share enables a pairwise shared key between any pair of users. A verification of master shares enables all users to verify their master shares are generated consistently without revealing the master shares. In a group communication, the initiator can become the server to select a group key and distribute it to each other user over a pairwise shared channel. Our design is unique since the storage of each user is minimal, the verification of master shares is efficient and the group key distribution is centralized. There are public-key based group key establishment protocols without a trusted third party. However, these protocols can only establish a single group key. Our protocol is a non-public-key solution and can establish multiple group keys which is computationally efficient.

Code based Secret Sharing Schemes for MANET

Secret values sharing in MANET is computationally insecure and inconsistent because of its dynamic nature. Shamir`s proposal is well known prominent secret sharing schemes. But it does not provide a dynamic approach to the particular application. In the same distribution process nodes may join or leave the network and able to obtain the similar capabilities as initial nodes; further, the joined nodes gain the shares (updated shares) corresponding to the secret. Two additional features of proposed system are that it allows to implement threshold operations, one for distributing secret information with other nodes and the other is using our threshold schemes in key management. Secret values sharing in MANET is computationally insecure and inconsistent because of its dynamic nature. Proposed the group key establishment protocol operations in detail and also proposed two different methods for dealing network dynamic nature including adding and removing of the nodes.

An authenticated group key transfer protocol using elliptic curve cryptography

Several groupware applications like e-conferences, pay-per view, online games, etc. require a common session key to establish a secure communication among the group participants. For secure communication, such applications often need an efficient group key establishment protocol to construct a common session key for group communications. Conventional group key transfer protocols depends on mutually trusted key generation center (KGC) to generate and distribute the group key to each participant in each session. However, those approaches require extra communication overheads in the server setup. This paper presents an efficient and secure group key transfer protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The proposed protocol demonstrates a novel group key transfer protocol, in which one of the group member plays the role of KGC (the protocol without an online KGC, which is based on elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) and Shamir’s secret sharing scheme. The confidentiality of the proposed protocol is ensured by Shamir’s secret sharing, i.e., information theoretically secure and provides authentication using ECDLP. Furthermore, the proposed protocol resists against potential attacks (insider and outsider) and also significantly reduces the overheads of the system. The security analysis section of the present work also justifies the security attributes of the proposed protocol under various security assumptions.

Secure broadcast in distributed networks with strong adversaries

AbstractThis paper proposes a framework that enables secure one‐to‐many communication for networks with limited capabilities in the face of a strong adversary that can capture an arbitrary set of nodes. Our approach consists of two main components: (a) group key establishment protocol and (b) special key management. Especially, we try to address the following question: How strong of security properties can we achieve for broadcast communication in hardware‐limited networks with a strong adversary? We propose approaches and their variants that neither require special hardware nor use costly cryptographic operations. With thorough security and efficiency analyses, we discuss how our solutions can be applied to a variety of hardware‐limited distributed systems. We also describe the implementation and evaluation results of the most promising variants. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Group Key Establishment for Enabling Secure Multicast Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks Deployed for IoT Applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a prominent fundamental technology of the Internet of Things (IoTs). Rather than device-to-device communications, group communications in the form of broadcasting and multicasting incur efficient message deliveries among resource-constrained sensor nodes in the IoT-enabled WSNs. Secure and efficient key management is in many cases used to protect the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of multicast messages. This paper develops two group key establishment protocols for secure multicast communications among the resource-constrained devices in IoT. Major deployment conditions and requirements of each protocol are described in terms of the specific IoT application scenarios. Furthermore, the applicability of the two protocols is analyzed and justified by a comprehensive analysis of the performance, scalability, and security of the protocols proposed.

Scalable attribute-based group key establishment: from passive to active and deniable

A protocol compiler is presented which transforms any unauthenticated (attribute-based) group key establishment protocol into an authenticated attribute-based group key establishment. If the protocol to which the compiler is applied does not make use of long-term secrets, then the resulting protocol is, in addition, deniable. In particular, applying our compiler to an unauthenticated 2-round protocol going back to Burmester and Desmedt results in a 3-round solution for attribute-based group key establishment, offering both forward secrecy and deniability.

A Scalable ID-based Constant-round AGKE Protocol with Logarithmic Computation Complexity

Group key establishment is one of the basic building blocks in securing group communication. In this paper, motivated by Desmedt's BD-II protocol, we propose a secure ID-Based group key establishment protocol which has a constant number of rounds and requires only computation and communication. Our scheme achieves key negotiate by scalar multiplication other than using pairing computation which requires expensive computation cost. Moreover, we have adapted aggregate signature technique verifying the validity of transcripts simultaneously, which greatly improves the computational efficiency. We have proved the security of protocol under the intractability of DDH problem in the RO model.

Secure Key Transfer Protocol Based on Secret Sharing for Group Communications

SUMMARY Group key establishment is an important mechanism to construct a common session key for group communications. Conventional group key establishment protocols use an on-line trusted key generation center (KGC) to transfer the group key for each participant in each session. However, this approach requires that a trusted server be set up, and it incurs communication overhead costs. In this article, we address some security problems and drawbacks associated with existing group key establishment protocols. Besides, we use the concept of secret sharing scheme to propose a secure key transfer protocol to exclude impersonators from accessing the group communication. Our protocol can resist potential attacks and also reduce the overhead of system implementation. In addition, comparisons of the security analysis and functionality of our proposed protocol with some recent protocols are included in this article.

Design, Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Group Key Establishment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are comprised of a vast number of ultra-small autonomous computing, communication and sensing devices, with restricted energy and computing capabilities, that co-operate to accomplish a large sensing task. Such networks can be very useful in practice, e.g. in the local monitoring of ambient conditions and reporting them to a control center. In this paper we propose a new lightweight, distributed group key establishment protocol suitable for such energy constrained networks. Our approach basically trade-offs complex message exchanges by performing some amount of additional local computations. The extra computations are simple for the devices to implement and are evenly distributed across the participants of the network leading to good energy balance. We evaluate the performance our protocol in comparison to existing group key establishment protocols both in simulated and real environments. The intractability of all protocols is based on the Diffie-Hellman problem and we used its elliptic curve analog in our experiments. Our findings basically indicate the feasibility of implementing our protocol in real sensor network devices and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each approach given the available technology and the corresponding efficiency (energy, time) criteria.

Multiparty authentication services and key agreement protocols with semi-trusted third party

This paper introduces a new family of group key establishment protocols suitable for small or medium-sized groups. Five protocols are presented, using a semi-trusted server, with varying security service. The first one is a non-authenticated key agreement protocol suitable for applications with low security requirements. The second protocol adds an authenticated key agreement to provide collaborative authentication. The third and the fourth protocols provide key establishment with integrity and confirmation services, and the fifth protocol is the member adding protocol. A major advantage of the protocols is that they reduce the numbers of rounds from n to 5.