Asymmetric Group Key Agreement Protocol from Short Signatures

Abstract

Asymmetric group key agreement allows a group of users to negotiate a public encryption key that corresponds to several decryption keys, and each decryption key can only be computed by one group member. This novel notion ensures the confidentiality of communication among group members and allows any external entity to send messages to the group. However, the existing authenticated asymmetric group key agreement protocols are designed in identity-based cryptosystem or certificateless public key cryptosystem, which are not widely deployed. In this paper, we propose an efficient authenticated asymmetric group key agreement protocol. The protocol captures the security of secrecy, known-key security, key-compromise impersonation, unknown key-share and key control while being resistant to active attacks. The security of our protocol is reduced to the k-BDHE problem.