Title: An escrow-less identity-based group-key agreement protocol for dynamic peer groups

Authors: Saikat Chakrabarti, Santosh Chandrasekhar, Mukesh Singhal

Addresses: International Standards Group, Siemens IT Solutions and Services, Inc., Beaverton, OR 97006, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA

Abstract: Dynamic Peer Group (DPG) applications, such as video-conferencing and multi-user gaming environments have proliferated the internet and group-key agreement protocols are critical in securing DPG communication. Identity-based cryptosystems avoid certificate management complications inherent to traditional public-key systems but introduce key escrow, which is highly undesirable in most applications. We design a scalable technique to eliminate key escrow and develop a distributed, escrow-less identity-based group-key agreement protocol for securing resource-constrained DPG communication. The proposed protocol is provably secure against passive adversaries, resilient to active attacks, scalable and more cost effective than any such protocol. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis to support the claims.

Keywords: group key agreement; identity-based cryptosystems; key escrow; DPGs; dynamic peer groups; supersingular elliptic curves; bilinear pairing; decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem; videoconferencing; multi-user gaming; cryptography; security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2009.027343

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2009 Vol.4 No.3, pp.171 - 188

Published online: 20 Jul 2009 *

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