Group Key Agreement Protocol Based on Privacy Protection and Attribute Authentication

Abstract

Group key agreement is a good way to ensure secure communication within a group. However, the identity authentication, privacy protection, and information sharing access control (different access rights may exist for different sensitivity of information) are key issues to be solved in group key agreement. Aiming at these problems, this paper proposes a group key agreement protocol based on privacy protection and attribute authentication (GKA-PPAA). The protocol proposes identity authentication for hidden attributes; it not only preserves the advantages of traditional identity-based key agreement protocol, but also provides hiding the identity information and privacy protection of the individual, and also proposes information sharing access control, which different secret information is shared among a set of members who have different levels of authority. It increases the flexibility of group key management. In addition, the group key factors are also calculated before the group key agreement, which eliminates most of the computation overhead due to the group key agreement. This protocol is proven secure under the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) and decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) problem assumptions. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is much more efficient than the existing ones.